


From The Same Star

by almostafantasia



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, Slow Burn, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, There's Murder, but the plot is completely different to the show and all the kills are new too, by that I mean that Eve is still MI6 and Villanelle is still an assassin, canon adjacent, there will be smut eventually, there's pining, very slow burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:14:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 59,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24544438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/almostafantasia/pseuds/almostafantasia
Summary: In a world where your soulmate’s initials appear on your skin after you meet for the first time, Eve’s life gets turned upside down when the single letter ‘V’ appears on her abdomen on the same day that a senior MI6 official gets assassinated just down the road from where she works.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 456
Kudos: 1275





	1. eternal love doesn't pay the bills

**Author's Note:**

> I was sent this prompt by @tilthestarsburnblue and a couple of anons on tumblr who all told me they'd like to see a Villaneve soulmates AU and now that the series 3 finale has confirmed once and for all that they are actually soulmates, it feels like my duty to write and share this fic with the world.

> **_I feel like a part of my soul has loved you since the beginning of everything. Maybe we’re from the same star. - Emery Allen_ **

* * *

Eve is going to be late for work.

It’s all Niko’s fault. Thanks to the school summer holidays, Eve has grown accustomed to having exclusive access to the bathroom every morning for the last six weeks. But that luxury is gone now. Eve was woken this morning not by the obnoxious beeping of her alarm clock, but by the sound of the shower pipes shuddering into life. Now that the new school year is starting, Eve will have to completely adjust her morning routine to accommodate Niko too.

If only he could have waited to let Eve use the bathroom first, the selfish bastard.

As Eve clips back a few damp flyaway curls, not having enough time to dry her hair properly without risking getting to work too late to be able to blame her tardiness on the traffic, she desperately tries to remember whether her bus pass is in her bag or the pocket of the pants she haphazardly threw into the laundry basket on Friday after work.

“Honey, have you seen my bus pass?” asks Eve, as she races down the stairs less than a minute later, tucking her crumpled blouse into her navy skirt as she goes.

“Bus pass is in your coat pocket,” says Niko, looking up from the newspaper he reads while enjoying a slice of toast at the kitchen table. “I found it in your trousers when I did the laundry yesterday.”

“Thank you so much!” says Eve, as she slips her feet into the shoes in the hallway and grabs her coat from the hook, patting each pocket in turn until she finds the familiar rectangular shape of her bus pass. “And my…?”

“Your keys are in the tray in the hall,” says Niko, answering her question before she can even finish asking it. “And I’ve made you lunch and put it in your bag.”

“You’re a superstar!”

Eve rushes into the kitchen to press an appreciative kiss to Niko’s forehead, then races back into the hallway to grab her bag and her keys.

It’s only when she has one hand outstretched towards the front door that something registers in her mind.

Taking a couple of steps backwards and peering around the doorframe into the kitchen, Eve asks, “Wait, are you wearing a tie?”

Niko’s hand comes up to touch the tie knotted loosely at his collar, self-consciously adjusting the unfamiliar accessory.

“Yes, uh, do you like it?” 

Eve can’t remember a single instance over the last few years in which she’s seen Niko wear a tie that hasn’t been for either a wedding or a funeral. Out of his typical flannel shirts, he almost looks like a completely different man, and now that Eve takes a moment to look at him properly, she is certain that he’s done something different with his hair to make it look a little less unruly than usual. 

Eve doesn’t have to worry yet, not until he decides to get rid of the mustache. She knows that there will be something seriously wrong with Niko if he ever does that. 

“Very handsome, Mr Polastri. What’s it in aid of? There aren’t any new young teaching assistants you’re trying to impress, are there?”

“Hundreds,” answers Niko, a mischievous glint flashing through his eyes. “No, it’s my first day as a head of year, remember? I thought the extra responsibility deserved a smarter look.”

“You know that teenagers can smell bullshit a mile away?”

Niko shrugs with the kind of carefree attitude that can only be seen from a teacher at the start of term. Eve highly doubts that he will be quite this blasé about it at half term when the little shits have been terrorising him non-stop for seven weeks.

“It’s for my benefit more than theirs.”

“Well, I like it too.” Eve glances at her watch and realises that she’s going to have to call in a favour with Elena and ask that there’s a strong coffee and a pastry waiting on her desk when she gets to the office. “And we’ll revisit this conversation later because I’m going to be late!”

“Okay, I love you! Have a good day!”

“You too!” Eve calls out over her shoulder as she rushes through the front door.

* * *

The higher power that has been showering Eve with misfortune decides to take pity on her and she makes it to the bus stop with thirty seconds to spare before the next one arrives without her even having to break into a run. The bus is crowded but Eve is relieved that there are still a few seats available, and she folds down one of the sideways facing seats next to the luggage rack and drops into it as the bus lurches forward.

The problem with these seats, Eve remembers as yet more people pile onto the bus at the next stop just a few hundred yards down the road, is that they don’t allow for personal space. A young mother takes the seat next to Eve and parks the stroller containing her toddler in front of them, and when the bus starts moving again, the changing bag hanging from the handle collides with Eve’s thigh.

“I’m so sorry,” says the mother.

“Don’t worry about it,” Eve replies, as politely as she can manage, though she internally rages at Niko’s new morning routine once more. If she had been in the shower on time, then she would have made it onto an earlier bus and may even have managed to claim a front-facing seat towards the back.

The toddler in the stroller gurgles and smiles at Eve, who finds herself bubbling with jealousy at this small child’s lack of awareness of Monday mornings.

A coffee would  _ really _ help.

Eve digs out her phone from her bag and dials Elena’s number.

“Let me guess,” says Elena, picking up after the second ring and forgoing a greeting altogether, “you didn’t have time for breakfast at home and you want me to pick something up for you?”

Eve’s mouth falls open in disbelief and she promptly shuts it again.

“How did you know?”

“Eve, I’ve known you for three years and you’re predictable as hell on a Monday morning.”

“Well, today it’s Niko’s fault,” explains Eve. “He goes back to work today and it’s completely fu-” The baby watches Eve with wide eyes, as if it knows that she’s about to swear, and Eve swiftly changes direction mid-word, “- messed up my routine.”

“And what was it last Monday?” Elena asks amusedly. “Your alarm clock, wasn’t it?”

“The battery went flat.”

“I look forward to whatever convoluted excuse you come up with next week for a free breakfast courtesy of the Bank of Elena. Do you want a pain au chocolat with your coffee? I’m getting one for Bill.”

Eve’s mood brightens significantly at the prospect of a mouthful of buttery pastry and gooey chocolate.

“Ooh, yes please!”

“I honestly don’t know what you two would do without me,” says Elena. “I’m the glue that holds our shambles of a team together and I get none of the recognition.”

“You get my eternal love!”

“Eternal love doesn’t pay the bills. Anyway, gotta go. Catch you in a bit!”

Eve lets the phone drop back into her bag and, with the promise of caffeine and baked goods shining a glimmer of hope on an otherwise pitiful Monday morning, she sticks her tongue out and pulls a face at the baby. He giggles at her, then lunges forwards as far as the harness keeping him in the stroller will allow, his tiny hands trying to grab the strap of Eve’s bag.

“Franklin, no!”

The mother leans forward to coax her child back into the stroller, tightening the straps that keep him in place. Eve moves her bag out of his reach by clutching it closer to herself, but freezes when she notices a black mark on the skin of his wrist. The first letter is concealed by the sleeve of his striped sweatshirt but Eve can see the second - a letter ‘T’ - clearly and has no doubts about what she is seeing.

A soulmate mark.

“I’m so sorry,” says the mother.

“It’s fine,” says Eve. And then, because she is curious, “How old is he?”

“Nearly seventeen months.”

Marks can appear at any age, the only requirement is bumping into the right person and Eve knows that some people really do meet the person who is their soulmate when they're still in their childhood. She’s heard enough stories from Niko of petty playground drama stemming from teenagers who have marks but lack the emotional maturity to understand what it means. And she knows that some people get them even younger than that.

But this is a  _ baby _ , barely out of his mother’s womb and already bearing the stamp of fate. Eve can’t help the fact that she feels jealousy towards this child for achieving in just seventeen months what she has failed to do in over forty years. It’s hardly his fault - Eve doubts that the toddler even realises that there is something printed on his wrist, let alone that there is a significance to those letters, but she still envies him. She has never had such a mark appear on her own body.

Not that it matters. Eve has Niko. When they met and fell in love all those years ago, they both agreed that they were actually the lucky ones - that choosing to spend their whole lives together despite neither bearing a mark was a much better sign of compatibility than being forced together because the universe said so.

It would have been nice, though, if the universe had given her a little thumbs up of reassurance for making the right choice.

Eve looks back at the toddler, now wriggling against his confines and whining pathetically at his mother. With a combination of drool and snot on his face, perhaps Eve does have it better than him after all.

“He’s cute,” lies Eve.

She is saved from having to say anything else to the mother when her phone chimes with an incoming message. She fumbles around inside her bag for it and takes it out to find a text from Elena, who has sent her a selfie from inside the bakery next to their office with the accompanying all-caps message -  _ TELL ME AGAIN HOW MUCH YOU LOVE ME. _

Eve replies with a string of emojis, mostly hearts of various colours but she throws in a coffee cup and a cat with hearts instead of eyes for good measure, then puts her phone away and tries to ignore the baby in front of her.

This coffee from Elena is going to end up being the only good part of Eve’s day, she can already tell.

* * *

“You know, if I was a stricter boss, I would have fired your arse years ago,” Bill says, voice muffled around his mouthful of croissant.

“I don’t see what the problem is,” says Eve, letting her bag fall from her hand onto the floor beside her desk with a thud as she drops into her chair and reaches out to switch on her computer. “I’m only eight minutes late.”

“A lot can happen in eight minutes,” pipes up Elena. “For example, eight minutes is just long enough for me to eat the pastry I bought for you  _ and _ throw away the evidence.”

Eve’s jaw drops open.

“You didn’t.”

Elena pauses for just long enough that Eve believes she actually might have, until she cracks and lifts her coat from where it had been lying across her desk, revealing a styrofoam coffee cup and a brown paper bag. Elena rolls her chair over to Eve’s desk and places both down.

“No, I didn’t,” Elena concedes. “For which you should be extremely grateful.”

Eve tears open the paper bag and lets out a moan as she lays eyes on the pain au chocolat within, the pastry flaky and mouthwateringly golden. Eve picks it up with careful fingers, not wanting to waste a single crumb, and lifts it to her mouth to take a bite. She sinks back in her chair as the pastry melts in her mouth, leaving behind a sticky chocolatey residue. 

“Mmm,” Eve hums appreciatively. “So grateful.”

“I’m going to leave you two alone,” says Elena, rolling back over to her own desk. “I feel like I’m witnessing a very private moment.”

“Piss off,” Eve manages to say around a mouthful of pastry.

She takes a sip of hot coffee to wash down the crumbs, sighing again contentedly at the bitter taste of the caffeine that will get her through the first part of the day, then picks up the folder that has been left on her desk. There’s a post-it note stuck to the front of it with Eve’s name written in Bill’s handwriting above a smiley face, which does the opposite of what it’s supposed to and sours Eve’s mood again, knowing that Bill only draws smiley faces when he knows the assignment he’s given her will bore her to death.

Sure enough, when Eve flips open the file and scans the first page inside, she finds a research brief that is almost identical to two others she worked on last week.

“Seriously?” Eve groans. She glances across at the matching file on Elena’s desk, then asks, “What have you got?” 

Elena’s eyes brighten with glee as she says, “Suspected terrorist.”

“Not fair,” grumbles Eve, closing her own file and tossing it back onto her desk. Eve glares at Bill from across the office and asks, “Why does she get the interesting one?”

“Because Elena was on time  _ and  _ she bought me breakfast,” says Bill, raising both eyebrows at Eve. “Let that be a lesson to you about punctuality.”

Eve would rather work another hundred of these mundane assignments back to back than admit to Bill that he has a very good point, which is why she passive-aggressively tears off a chunk of her pastry and shoves it in her mouth, chewing noisily as she pulls her keyboard closer and logs onto her computer.

Working as an intelligence researcher for MI6 is nowhere near as exciting as it seemed when Eve applied for the job all those years ago. Eve’s job is ninety percent paperwork with none of the glamour of being an agent. 

Today’s new file looks particularly tedious. The team gets given a few like this each month, just standard research into potential corruption at local government level. Even then, it’s rare that Eve will actually find anything that her superiors will find interesting. She can already predict how this will go - her research will lead her to uncover something small like a tax mishap or an extramarital affair, perhaps a spot of embezzlement if Eve is particularly lucky - then she will compile her findings into a few neatly typed pages of Times New Roman, only to never hear about it again.

It was the promise of doing something meaningful that led Eve to MI6. After more than a decade, Eve wonders if she’s had an impact on any significant operations at all.

As her computer takes an eternity to boot up, seemingly as reluctant to start the week as Eve feels, she slides open one of her desk drawers and she rummages around inside for a pen. Her fingers clasp around a plastic biro and she pulls it out triumphantly, but her eyes fall on the folder tucked away beneath the random bits of stationary she keeps in her desk.

There are  _ some _ perks to Eve’s job, at least. She’s always had an interest in criminal psychology dating back to when she wrote her master’s thesis in college, but in college she didn’t have access to the same government intelligence databases that she does now. Eve’s particular area of fascination lies in female psychopathy - she has an entire bookshelf dedicated to the subject in her private office back at home, but she likes to use the MI6 network to do a bit of personal research when Bill isn’t looking. The folder in her desk drawer is Eve’s latest project, mostly print-outs of recent news articles of assassinations across Europe, all of which Eve has compiled along with pages and pages of her own notes as she tries to formulate a theory that there is a female assassin at work.

It’s all just a hobby, of course. Nobody would pay the slightest attention to Eve if she actually presented her research to a superior.

“Come on, Eve,” says Bill, his voice startling her out of her own thoughts. “I don’t pay you to drink coffee.”

Eve knows that Bill is only teasing her for being distracted, but she rolls her eyes nonetheless and pushes the drawer closed.

There will be time to continue her private research later.

* * *

When Eve gets home from work, she walks into the living room to find Niko on the couch with a bottle of the beer watching the rugby. She puts her bag down on the table, then shrugs her coat off and drapes it over the back of one of the dining chairs, before wandering over to Niko.

“How was school?”

“Oh, you know,” Niko answers vaguely, without taking his eyes away from the television.

His appearance is very different to when Eve left him this morning. He’s no longer wearing his nice shirt but instead one of his usual plaid ones, the cuffs unbuttoned and the sleeves pushed up his forearms. Niko’s hair is messier too, carrying the shaggy appearance that Eve is used to, like he’s spent most of the day running his fingers through it. Remembering the tie he was wearing when she saw him at breakfast this morning, Eve decides to comment on its absence.

“You changed out of the tie?”

“Yeah. It was strangling me.”

“That’s a shame,” says Eve, sitting down sideways across Niko’s lap and plucking the half-empty bottle of beer from his hands, which she places on the end table next to the couch. “I thought it was quite sexy.”

Draping her arms around Niko’s neck, Eve leans down for a kiss, only for Niko to duck his head out of the way and peer over Eve’s shoulder so that he can continue to watch the television.

“Eve, I’m watching the rugby.”

Affronted by Niko’s obvious lack of interest in her advances, Eve swivels around so that she can look at the screen too without leaving Niko’s lap, and squints at the scoreboard in the upper left hand corner. 

“You don’t support either of those teams,” she points out, bringing one hand to the back of Niko’s neck and running her fingers through his shaggy hair, something which Eve knows from experience is usually a pretty reliable way of turning him on.

“I’m still watching it,” Niko says, reaching for the bottle that Eve moved out of the way and taking another swig from it, seemingly indifferent to Eve’s efforts at seduction.

Letting out a sigh of defeat when she realises that she has no chance of being able to compete with televised sports for Niko’s attention, Eve slides off his lap and goes to hang her coat up on the hook in the hallway.

“What’s for dinner?” she calls out behind her as she goes.

“Oh, I already ate,” replies Niko. “The leftovers are in the pot on the stove.”

Eve wanders past Niko into the kitchen and helps herself to a portion of Niko’s homemade vegetable stew. It’s still hot and the smell of the spices is enough for Eve’s mouth to start watering. Suddenly, her shitty day is at the back of her mind with the prospect of a nice hearty meal to put her in a good mood.

That is, until she turns around and lays her eyes on Niko again. He’s still passive-aggressively sipping from his bottle of beer as he frowns at the television, clearly in a foul mood but with no obvious reason why. And honestly, Eve has had a terrible enough day today without having to put up with a grown man sulking like a small child.

“What has gotten into you?” Eve asks, as she opens the cutlery drawer and grabs a spoon.

With the disgruntled sigh that Niko lets out, it is almost like it is Eve with the problem, rather than him.

“Eve, I’ve spent the entire day listening to teenagers whine about their insignificant problems - is it too much to ask for a bit of peace and quiet at home to enjoy a beer and a game of rugby?”

“Fine,” retorts Eve, nudging the cutlery drawer closed with her hip. “But I’ve had a difficult day too and I don’t deserve to be spoken to like that. I’ll be eating dinner in my study when you’re ready to apologise.”

* * *

An hour later, Eve is in a much better mood. Her stomach is pleasantly full of stew, though with the way that Niko spoke to her earlier still playing on her mind, she is loath to admit that she actually enjoyed his food.

But the main reason she is in a better mood is because this is her happy place - alone in her office with a glass of wine and all her research. She printed out a couple of articles from a psychology journal while at work today and now Eve goes through them with a highlighter and a pencil, picking out the interesting paragraphs and annotating with her own thoughts. 

When a soft knock on the door brings Eve out of her studies, she looks up to find Niko standing in the doorway.

“Eve, can we talk?”

“Not if you’re going to snap at me again,” Eve replies brusquely, putting down her highlighter and leaning back in her chair.

“I need to talk to you about something,” continues Niko. He wears a worried frown on his face, the lines on his forehead more pronounced than usual. “Something serious.”

“Oh god,” says Eve, getting to her feet as her eyes widen in panic. She crosses over to Niko and cups the palm of her hand against his cheek, looking into his eyes with concern as she asks, “Are you ill? Is it cancer?”

“No, no,” Niko says, shaking his head. “Something happened and … and it’s probably best if I just show you.”

Niko’s fingers go to the buttons on the front of his shirt and he starts popping them open one by one until he can pull the collar aside to show his left shoulder, where two little black letters stand out against his pale skin.

_ GD. _

Niko has a mark.

Wait,  _ Niko  _ has a  _ mark? _

That can’t be right. Niko is hers. He’s not supposed to get a mark,  _ neither _ of them are supposed to get a mark. They’re supposed to live out the rest of their lives together, content and unified by their unblemished skin.

But this mark, those two tiny letters on Niko’s shoulder, contradict everything that Eve thought she knew about her marriage. This mark says that Eve is not Niko’s after all, that somebody else is supposed to be with him instead of her.

Somebody else that he has met today.

“Wha- what’s that?” asks Eve, unable to tear her eyes away from the mark.

“I noticed it when I was getting changed after work,” explains Niko. “It’s why I was a little standoffish when you got home. It’s … it’s just a  _ lot _ to process, you know?”

“You’re telling me?” Eve scoffs.

She reaches out to Niko’s mark, intent on touching it to check that it’s real, but she stops with her fingers a few inches away from his skin. She doesn’t  _ want _ to touch it, the evidence of somebody else on her husband’s body.

“Do you know who it is?” Eve asks, unsure if she wants to know the answer.

Niko says nothing, but the way that he glances away and avoids eye contact with Eve is enough to tell her what she wants to know.

“Niko, please?”

“There’s a new teacher in the English department,” Niko eventually tells her. “She asked me for directions to the staff room.”

“What’s her name?”

“Eve, does it matter?” asks Niko, buttoning up his shirt again to cover up the mark.

“I want to know her name,” Eve insists.

Niko hesitates, then answers, “It’s Gemma.”

“Gemma,” repeats Eve.

The name leaves a nasty taste in Eve’s mouth.

Gemma. Gemma and Niko. Niko and Gemma. Niko and  _ Eve. _

Gemma.

Eve has never had particularly strong feelings about a name but right now she despises every Gemma on the planet.

“Look, Eve,” says Niko, when Eve has been silently plotting how to take down this Gemma woman for several long seconds. “We’ve talked about this. We talked about it before we got married and we’ve talked about it since. This doesn’t change anything.”

“How am I supposed to compete with fate?” 

“You don’t. There is no competition, Eve. You win. A thousand times over, you win. I married  _ you.” _

“But she’s your soulmate,” Eve reminds him.

“It’s not as simple as that. We’ve talked about this loads of times before. I chose you, Eve. I still choose you. We don’t even know if I’m Gemma’s soulmate too. It could be entirely one-sided.”

Niko’s words do very little to reassure her. Instead they sit like a heavy weight tethered to Eve’s aching heart.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” asks Eve, fighting the lump that forms in her throat. “Because it doesn’t.”

Niko tries to reach out to Eve, lifting his hand to her cheek, but she ducks away from his touch. 

“There are hundreds of ways this could play out, Eve, but every single one of them ends with me continuing to love you. Gemma is probably just my platonic soulmate!”

“Is she pretty?” Eve dares to ask.

“Eve…”

“If it changes nothing then you’ll tell me if she’s pretty or not,” Eve challenges him, staring directly into his eyes, even as he shoots her a look as if to blame this entire situation on her.

After several seconds of hesitation, Niko eventually answers, “I … I guess she’s quite attractive, if that’s your thing. Which it isn’t. You’re my thing, Eve.”

“So she  _ is _ pretty?”

“Does it matter?” shrugs Niko, running an exasperated hand through his shaggy hair. “I’m in love with  _ you, _ Eve. I can’t believe I’m having to remind you of that after so many years of marriage.”

“Don’t make me out to be the bad guy!” Eve raises her voice at him.

“I’m not! This is stressful for me too, Eve.”

Eve continues to stare at Niko for a few seconds, waiting for him to concede and admit that she has every right to feel hurt and betrayed by the mark on his shoulder, but he says nothing.

“Was there anything else?” she asks, returning to her office chair and picking up the discarded highlighter.

“Is that it?” asks Niko. “You don’t have anything else to say?”

“I’ve said all that I wanted to,” Eve replies coldly. “I need some time to process.”

“Okay.” Niko is silent for a few seconds, then he adds, “Are you coming to bed? I believe you had some tie fantasies you wanted to act upon?”

Without looking up, Eve replies, “Not yet. I’ve got some stuff I need to finish.”

“Eve?”

“Mm?”

“Eve, look at me.”

Eve flicks the lid off her highlighter and uses it to go over a sentence that catches her interest, before finally lifting her head to look up at Niko.

“I love you,” Niko tells her.

“Okay” Eve replies, before returning her attention to the article.

She can feel Niko’s eyes on her, his presence lingering in the doorway, but she has said all that she needs to on the matter. He waits for a few more seconds, then Eve hears him sigh and mutter something under his breath about this not being his fault, before his footsteps recede down the hall to their bedroom.

With Niko gone, Eve allows her anger to fester. It’s not at all fair that this should happen to her. Eve has been nothing but good all her life. Sure, there have been a couple of times that she’s lied to a homeless person and told them that she doesn’t have any change on her when the truth is that she didn’t have time to stop and look for her wallet, and there was that one speeding ticket she got twenty years ago, but apart from a few tiny incidents, Eve has been a good person. She’s been a good wife.

And  _ this _ is how she gets rewarded. By coming home after an already shitty day to find that the husband she has been loyal to for almost two decades has got some other bimbo’s initials on his body.

Fucking  _ Gemma. _

* * *

It is almost midnight by the time Eve switches off the lamp in her office and creeps into the bedroom. As she silently changes out of her clothes and into her pyjamas, Eve watches Niko’s shadowy form on the bed, his chest rising and falling with each deep breath he takes. Eve brushes her teeth in their ensuite bathroom without turning the light on, then returns to the bedroom and carefully slips under the covers so as to not disturb Niko.

Eve has no sooner rolled onto her side with her back facing Niko, than she hears the rustling of bedclothes and feels Niko’s heavy arm wind around her waist from behind. 

“Niko, I’m not in the mood,” she whispers into the darkness, shrugging his arm off and shuffling closer to the edge of the bed to get further away from him.

Silence stretches out between them for a few seconds, then Eve hears Niko roll onto his back and let out a disappointed huff.

“You can’t blame me for this, Eve. I don’t know what else you want me to say. You’re the one I want to be with.”

Eve says nothing in response, but just pulls the covers tighter around her shoulder.

She can’t help the way that she feels, but ever since Niko revealed his mark, Eve has had a niggling doubt at the back of her mind that maybe she’s the third wheel in her own marriage.


	2. accidents happen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for showing so much love to the first chapter! <3

Eve rises early the next morning after a restless night filled with dreams of a faceless supermodel tempting Niko away from her. She is in and out of the shower before Niko even stirs from the bed and leaves the house while he is still using the bathroom.

It’s not that she is avoiding him, per se. It’s just that she knows that if they try to have a rational conversation about the whole situation now, it’s going to blow up into a heated argument and then Eve is going to be late for work for the second day running. It’s in everybody’s best interests that Eve doesn’t give them the opportunity to have that discussion until they actually have time for it.

Okay, so maybe Eve  _ is _ avoiding Niko. 

Can she really be blamed for that?

It’s strange being the first one in the office. Eve quite often finds herself alone here in the evenings, regularly choosing to stay beyond her contracted hours to finish whatever she’s working on or to make use of the intelligence databases at her disposal to continue with her own private research. But mornings really aren’t Eve’s thing and she usually arrives each day to find that at least one of the other two has already beaten her to the office.

Eve thinks back to yesterday, and wonders if she can use the logic that earned her a dull case yesterday and this new out-of-character earliness to wrangle the most interesting file that shows up on Bill’s desk this morning all for herself.

It’s worth a try.

God, Eve needs some excitement in her life. And not in a ‘my husband has a soulmate and it’s another woman’ kind of way, but in an igniting, all-consuming, set-your-bones-on-fire kind of way.

With that in mind, Eve uses her time alone in the office before Elena and Bill arrive to fully prepare her argument for why she deserves the next juicy case that gets delivered to their door.

* * *

“I just can’t believe that Niko got a mark!”

Eve lets out her frustration regarding Niko in the only way she knows how - by ranting to Elena as they head out of the office and to a local coffee shop to grab some lunch.

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Eve,” says Elena. “Am I supposed to agree with you and call him a shitstain for something out of his control?”

“Maybe!” Eve says with a shrug, as she and Elena weave in and out of the pedestrians moving in the opposite direction. “But do you know what  _ is _ in his control? His reaction! And the way he reacted was by making himself out to be the victim when clearly this whole situation is so much worse for me! He’s got a backup option now. He could decide to leave me at any moment to be with her.”

They stop at a crossing and Elena presses the button to change the lights as a steady stream of black cabs and Deliveroo riders on bikes continue to pass them.

“This woman-”

“Gemma,” Eve corrects her, spitting out the name of a woman who she was blissfully unaware of until fifteen hours ago.

“This  _ Gemma, _ what’s the deal with her?” asks Elena. “Has she got a husband? A boyfriend?” Elena pauses, then adds, “A girlfriend?”

The traffic draws to a halt as the lights change, and they’re moving again, crossing the road swiftly and falling into step with the pedestrians on the other side of the road as they get closer to their favourite coffee shop.

“I don’t know,” Eve answers truthfully.

“Does she even have a mark with Niko’s initials?”

“I don’t know.”

Eve doubts that Niko even knows the answer to these questions yet. She thinks of him and what he’s doing right now, feeling the jealousy start to bubble within her gut as she pictures him sitting in the staff room with his tupperware box of leftover stew, talking and laughing with Gemma.

“But the problem isn’t about her having a mark,” Eve attempts to explain to Elena. “It’s the fact that Niko has one. I don’t think I’d mind as much if it was the other way around, if she had a mark and Niko didn’t.”

“So what you’re really saying is that you don’t trust Niko?”

“No, I … wait,  _ is _ that what I’m saying?”

“How would you feel if it was the other way around?” asks Elena. “If  _ you _ got the mark and had to show it to Niko? Would it change anything between you?”

Eve lets herself consider that possibility for a moment. It’s something she has thought about before, something that she’s even discussed with Niko before. It came up when they first started dating and realised that neither bore the other’s mark, then again when they started talking about marriage and whether things would change if either of them met a soulmate. And sure, that was before Gemma, when one of them having a soulmate was purely a hypothetical situation that neither of them truly believed would ever happen, but the conversation between them always pans out the same.

The conclusion reached every single time is “nothing changes”.

If Eve had discovered a mark, rather than Niko, would things have changed? Eve likes to think that they wouldn’t. Niko is her life, and she can’t suddenly flip a switch and make him vanish. She couldn’t - and  _ wouldn’t _ \- just toss him to the side for a complete stranger if two little letters suddenly appeared on her skin.

So why would Niko treat her like that given the current circumstances?

The logical answer is that he wouldn’t.

“God, I hate it when you talk sense,” Eve finally concedes.

They reach the coffee shop and Elena holds the door wide open so that Eve can step inside first.

“Anyway,” says Elena, as she follows Eve inside and the pair of them join the short queue at the deli counter. “You might have a soulmate too. You never know. They could be just around any corner.”

“I really doubt that’s gonna happ-” Eve starts to disagree, but as she turns around to look at Elena, the bulky bag hanging from her shoulder collides with the person in front of her in the queue and Eve stops mid sentence.

“Hey!” the woman yells aggressively. “Watch it!”

The woman is younger than her, probably mid to late twenties if Eve had to guess, and her features are pretty. Her eyes are a hazel colour beneath brows that are thick but well-groomed. She wears make-up that is understated, just enough to accent the already sharp contours of her cheekbones and the glow of healthy skin. Chocolate coloured hair is cut into bangs at the front, which doesn’t do much to hide the crease between her eyebrows as she scowls angrily at Eve, and her full lips are pressed together in a frown. The clothes that she wears are simple - tailored black chinos and a white shirt that are possibly a uniform of some kind.

“I am  _ so _ sorry!” Eve apologises profusely. “Are you okay?”

The scowl slides off of the woman’s face and is replaced by something much softer. She tilts her head to the side almost imperceptibly, as if analysing Eve.

“No need to apologise,” replies the woman, her voice now soft and bright. She shoots Eve a charming smile, then adds, “Accidents happen.”

The barista calls out for the next customer, which happens to be this woman, and she turns away from Eve to give her order, though not without one final glance at Eve over her shoulder.

Relieved to have avoided a confrontation, Eve turns back to Elena and tries to remember what they were talking about before she accidentally knocked her bag into the young woman.

Oh yes, soulmates.

“I highly doubt that I have a soulmate out there,” Eve tells Elena. “My life is  _ way _ too boring for that.”

“You never know,” Elena shrugs optimistically.

“I thought you didn’t believe in the whole soulmates shebang?”

“Oh, I don’t,” answers Elena. Her eyes light up with mischief and she adds, “Not until a Greek god shows up with my initials tattooed onto his six pack, and then I’ll be lapping it up like the rest of you suckers!”

* * *

Eve feels marginally better after speaking to Elena about it, but just to be sure, she decides to get Bill’s opinion on the matter too.

“Was I wrong to be distant with Niko?” she asks him towards the end of the afternoon, while Elena has gone down the hallway to use the communal photocopier, leaving just Eve and Bill alone in their team’s office.

“About the mark?” Bill asks, looking up from his computer and meeting Eve’s gaze across the room.

“Yeah.”

Eve digs her teeth into her lower lip as she waits for an answer.

“I think you were in shock,” Bill tells her with a shrug.

“That’s not a yes or a no,” Eve points out.

Bill leans back into the seat of his chair, before he says, “I think your reaction made sense. I don’t imagine that it’s an easy situation, to have your husband tell you that somebody else is his soulmate. But I doubt it was easy for him either. I bet he was bricking it when he discovered the mark.”

Eve contemplates Bill’s words with a thoughtful nod, then slumps back in her chair dramatically.

“Why are you and Elena both being completely rational on the one day I want you to agree with me that Niko is an ass?”

Bill just shrugs and smiles, but before either of them can say anything else, Elena bursts back into the office with a sheaf of photocopied notes in one hand.

“Guys, you’ll never guess what I just heard!” says Elena, depositing the photocopies on her desk, before perching on the corner, about halfway between Bill and Eve. Her eyes flick back and forth between them, wide with expectancy, and when neither of them says anything she continues, “You know that Hugo guy I’ve been complaining to you about?”

“The posh one who fancies you?” asks Bill, raising an eyebrow.

“That’s him. Well I was just chatting to him at the copier and I assumed he was just going to ask me for my number -  _ again _ \- but then he said something really weird.”

“Oh god, Elena,” Eve says with a groan, running an exasperated hand over her head to smooth down the few loose flyaways at her hairline. “I don’t think I want to know what Hugo’s latest pickup lines are…”

“No, you’re going to want to hear this,” says Elena, leaning forwards slightly as if she is about to impart some really important news. “He said he’d heard a rumour that Paul McIntosh - you know the one who apparently got divorced from his husband a couple of months ago? Yeah, well apparently Paul was having lunch at that Korean restaurant on the corner earlier, when - and you’re not going to believe this - he was  _ murdered. _ Stabbed through the heart, according to Hugo. In broad daylight!”

“What?” Eve and Bill both exclaim at the same time.

“I know!” Elena agrees with them emphatically. “It’s mad!”

“And this Hugo,” says Bill, arching an eyebrow at Elena in disbelief, “is he a reliable source of information?”

Elena hesitates for a few seconds, before she concedes, “Well, no, but if that was his way of flirting with me then it backfired horribly because the first thing I did was run away from him so that I could tell you lot!”

“Stabbed?” asks Eve, frowning as she tries to remember what this Paul guy looks like so she can attempt to picture the scenario in her mind. “While out for lunch?”

Elena nods, then says, “And you’ll never guess who he was having lunch with at the time?”

“The Dalai Lama?” guesses Bill, shooting an amused glance at Eve.

“Carolyn Martens!” announces Elena.

Now Carolyn, Eve  _ does _ know. Though she has never worked with Carolyn directly because she is far too important to be mingling with the likes of Eve, Carolyn has a formidable reputation that has made her something of a heroine in the eyes of many at MI6, Elena included. Eve has seen Carolyn around a few times, in passing in the hallway or down in the canteen at lunchtime, and can understand what the deal is. Carolyn strides around with the hands in the pockets of her elegant trench coat like she runs the entire organisation, though to be fair to Carolyn, she probably does have great influence over large parts of what goes on at MI6. 

And though she can’t quite picture his face, Eve is pretty sure that Paul McIntosh, the man that Hugo is alleging has been murdered, is at a similar level of seniority to Carolyn. Eve finds it pretty difficult to believe that two people who have made it to such high positions of power at one of the world’s most renowned intelligence services, could both happen to let their guard down at exactly the same moment for long enough that one of them has been fatally stabbed.

It seems that Bill shares her doubts.

“Let me get this straight,” he says to Elena, and Eve recognises the expression on his face as the one he wears when he is about to call something out as being bullshit. Eve recognises it from the many times she has had to justify her lateness on a Monday morning. “You’re trying to convince us that two senior MI6 officials were enjoying a spot of food when one of them was horrifically and brutally murdered in front of the other?”

It all sounds quite sensationalist when Bill summarises it like that. 

“Exactly!”

“I have to admit,” says Bill, “that Hugo chap is getting more creative with his flirting techniques, though I’m not sure it’s working particularly well.”

“He was stabbed in front of Carolyn?” Eve asks Elena, ignoring Bill’s comment entirely. “She witnessed the entire thing?”

“Come on, Eve,” says Bill, laughing as if the whole thing is ludicrous. “You’re not actually entertaining the idea that this ridiculous story has any truth to it, are you?”

Eve shrugs, then answers, “It would be kind of cool if it was true.”

“Cool, Eve?” exclaims Elena, eyes wide with horror. “A man might’ve lost his life!”

Eve stays quiet for a few seconds, straining her mind to remember what Paul McIntosh even looks like (does he wear glasses, or is that some other guy?) so that she can try to humanise this supposed murder.

“Sorry,” Eve mumbles, before she adds, “But you have to admit it’s ballsy to kill a man while he’s out for lunch. Why not wait until later when he’s alone?”

“Okay, Jack the Ripper, I don’t think we need your expert opinion.”

“You know what,” says Eve, ignoring Elena’s comment. “Maybe I should find Carolyn Martens and ask what  _ actually _ happened. She must have seen the whole thing.”

“No,” Bill speaks up, shooting Eve a look of warning. “As your superior, I forbid you from going to ask Carolyn about this.”

“Why?”

“Because if it did happen, she’s probably not in the mood to be harassed by you,” explains Bill. “And if it didn’t, then you’re just going to look like a monumental pillock when you ask her about it.”

“Jesus, Bill,” says Elena. “You don’t mince your words, do you?”

Bill shrugs as his gaze shifts from Eve to Elena.

“I’m just telling it like it is.”

“Okay, you can stop me from speaking to Carolyn, but you can’t stop me from asking Hugo about it,” says Eve, getting up from her chair and grabbing a random sheet of paper from her desk. “I’ve got some photocopying to do!”

Eve leaves the office before either Bill or Elena can say anything else.

Hugo isn’t in the copy room when Eve peers her head around the door, but from the fact that he uses this particular copier, she knows that he must work in one of the other offices along this hallway. It doesn’t take long to find out exactly which one - Eve doesn’t particularly know Hugo beyond Elena’s complaints about his incessant flirting with her, but she still recognises the slightly-too-tight patterned shirt that he wears and knows that she’s found the right room.

“Hugo?” she asks, cautiously stepping into Hugo’s team’s office.

He turns with a frown on his face as he looks over his shoulder to see who is calling his name, but this falls off his face quickly and is replaced by his signature smile that is probably intended to charm.

“It’s Eve, isn’t it?” Hugo asks, as he swaggers across the office to greet Eve at the door. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I work with Elena,” Eve starts to explain, before Hugo cuts her off.

“Has she been talking about me?” he asks, with a smarmy grin on his face. “All good things, I hope.”

“She said you’d heard something about a guy getting murdered just down the road from here. Could you tell me a bit more about that?”

Hugo’s smile falters momentarily as he seems to realise that Eve and Elena haven’t actually been discussing him personally, but rather the story that he told, but he is quick to recover.

“It’s all just hearsay,” explains Hugo, “though my sources are usually pretty reliable. I know people in high places.”

Eve isn’t sure if this is supposed to impress her, but she is impatient to actually hear about what happened and whether there is anything more to the story than what Elena relayed to her and Bill.

“Okay, but what did you hear?” Eve asks, pressing Hugo for an answer without trying to come across as rude.

“Apparently,” Hugo begins, his eyes wide with excitement, “Paul McIntosh and Carolyn Martens went out for lunch and when Carolyn went to use the bathroom, somebody stabbed Paul. Straight through the heart - he was dead before Carolyn even got back.”

“Wait, so Carolyn  _ didn’t _ witness the murder?” Eve asks for clarification.

“I mean, she was there but not actually  _ there, _ from what I’ve heard. I think they reckon the waitress did it before scarpering.”

Now  _ that’s _ an interesting development that Elena didn’t mention.

“The waitress?” Eve repeats back. “You mean to say that it was a woman?”

Hugo scoffs at this question.

“Come on, Eve. This is the twenty-first century. Women can be killers too.”

Eve has to stop herself from rolling her eyes at this human embodiment of white male privilege attempting to lecture her about gender equality.

“I know,” says Eve. “It’s just unusual, that’s all. Do you know why she did it?”

“Haven’t the foggiest,” Hugo answers with a shrug. “Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters!” insists Eve. “I mean, it seems like it  _ has _ to be a professional hit. Her window of opportunity had to be tiny, to be able to kill him and get away before anybody noticed during the lunchtime rush. And to stab him through the heart - she  _ has _ to know exactly what she’s doing!”

At this point, Eve is just talking aloud as a means of understanding her own thoughts, rather than actually engaging in a two-sided conversation with Hugo.

“If you say so,” says Hugo. He narrows his eyes at her, then tilts his head ever so slightly to the side as he asks, “You’re getting quite excited by all this, aren’t you?”

Eve feels her cheeks start to flush with embarrassment, as she quickly tries to justify herself.

“It’s just an interest of mine,” she explains to Hugo. “The psychology of women who kill.”

Hugo stares at her really intently for a few seconds, and Eve wonders if he’s about to call her out for being just as messed up as the women she likes to study, before a slow smirk spreads across his face.

“Hot,” he says.

“Gross,” replies Eve. She takes a couple of steps backwards in the direction of the door, and then says, “Anyway, thanks for your help, Hugo.”

“No problem,” says Hugo. “Tell Elena to call me about going for that drink, okay?”

Eve pulls a disgusted face and says, “Tell her yourself!”

* * *

Before learning of Paul McIntosh’s alleged murder, Eve had every intention of going home tonight and apologising to Niko and giving him reassurance that she knows the mark on his shoulder isn’t his fault.

But that was  _ before _ .

Now, Eve has much more urgent matters to consider than making sure that she keeps her own marriage on track.

When Eve arrives home, Niko is sitting at the kitchen table, where he has set the table for dinner and placed a bouquet of flowers at Eve’s usual seat. Eve allows herself half a second to take it all in, long enough to realise that he’s wearing his nicest shirt which is usually reserved for anniversaries or apologies, and she presses a quick kiss to his lips as she whirls past on her way to her own study.

“I really appreciate the effort,” she tells him, as she ditches her coat and takes the heavy folder containing all her personal research on female assassins out of her bag. “But I’ve still got loads of work to do. Talk to you later?”

If Niko has anything to say in response, Eve doesn’t hang around for long enough to hear what it is.

Instead, Eve shuts herself away in the privacy of her office, sitting in the dim light of the desk lamp as she opens her folder and spreads out her research in front of her. Eve has collected a few assassinations that have happened over the last few months across Europe, all of which she believes to have been carried out by a woman. And given the scarcity of female contract killers in the industry, Eve has been working off the assumption that these kills were probably all carried out by the same woman.

Apart from that, Eve has nothing. The woman is untraceable.

And yet, it seems that she may have struck again today. In London. Just down the road from where Eve works. 

It’s too good of an opportunity to pass up.

Eve lifts a sheet of paper out of the printer on her desk and starts to meticulously note down every detail from her conversations with Elena and then Hugo, collecting all the information that she knows so far. Once that is all written down, she goes back through it again and starts to annotate with her own comments, drawing on information she knows from the other assassinations in her file and trying to make links so that she can start to build a clearer picture of this woman and how she operates.

There’s a flair to her kills, a certain kind of panache that is most unlike anything Eve has ever come across before. Almost all of the kills spread out across Eve’s desk have taken place in a public place. Some of them are violent, almost brutally so, and a few, including the one today, have a certain kind of arrogance to them, like the woman is testing the limits of what she can get away with before she gets caught.

Why kill somebody in public when it would be much easier and carry less risk to do it in private?

She  _ has  _ to be showing off. 

But for whom?

For Eve, perhaps? Well, not for Eve specifically, but for somebody like Eve. Perhaps this woman wants somebody to attempt to trace her. Perhaps that’s all part of the thrill, that the assassin likes to know that she is being watched. Like voyeurism, except with dead bodies rather than naked ones.

Eve’s eyes flicker over to one particular kill, where the victim was found without a shred of clothing in the private room of a German strip club.

Okay, dead bodies _as well_ _as_ naked ones.

There’s a soft knock on the door, then it opens and Niko steps inside. Eve is too engrossed in her work to look up.

“I brought you some dinner,” he says, crossing the office and setting down a plate of food on one of the only clear spaces of Eve’s desk not covered in research.

Eve hums her thanks distractedly, shifting through the papers until she finds profiles of each of the victims, wondering if she’ll be able to find a connection between them all now that there might be one more to add to the list.

“I’m going to bed now,” Niko says, when Eve gives no proper reply to his first statement. “Don’t stay up too late.”

All the victims have been male so far. But that doesn’t have to mean anything, it could just be a coincidence. A businessman, a politician, a university lecturer - those are all positions of power and influence, so could that be the link? But why would the same person or group want this particular selection of people dead. Unless the assassin is freelance, in which case the only link between the deaths would be her? Though surely somebody who is  _ this _ good at killing must have been snatched up by an organisation by now? 

But to what cause?

“Goodnight, Eve.”

“Sorry, what?” Eve asks, finally sparing Niko a glance, having not really been paying attention to anything that he has said since he walked in. She spots the plate on the desk and asks, “You brought me food?”

“It’s late and you haven’t eaten yet.”

“I’m actually not that hungry,” says Eve, just as her stomach lets out a traitorous growl.

Niko frowns, and then says, “What’s going on, Eve? Is this still about Gemma?”

“Who? Oh,  _ Gemma _ \- no, I’d actually forgotten about that.”

It’s the truth. It’s hard to believe that Eve was so worked up over an insignificant English teacher this morning, when Niko’s mark has barely crossed her mind since she learned that there might be a new murder to add to her file.

“So you’re not still mad?” asks Niko.

“Of course not,” says Eve, because she knows it’s what he wants to hear and the sooner he goes to bed, the sooner Eve can get on with her research again without interruptions.

“Good,” says Niko. “I knew you’d come around. Night, Eve.”

He leaves the room and Eve returns her full attention to her notes.

Stabbed through the heart, that’s what Hugo told her. Eve vaguely remembers taking an anatomy class in her first year of college but all she remembers is that she took the class, not any of the actual content. She reaches for her computer keyboard and does a quick search on Bing for stab wounds through the heart. Most of the results are full of medical jargon that make very little sense to Eve, but she finds some good articles that she understands and comes away with a few key details to add to her notes:-

One; fatally stabbing somebody through the heart is almost impossible if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Two; fatally stabbing somebody through the heart is still very difficult if you  _ do _ know what you’re doing and requires a combination of accuracy and strength.

Three; Paul McIntosh’s murder must have been carried out by a highly skilled assassin who was able to take advantage of a tiny window of opportunity before leaving him to bleed out and making her escape undetected in a restaurant full of diners.

The fact that this assassin is probably a woman leaves Eve feeling excited more than anything else.

There’s very little else that Eve can do with this investigation until she gets some more facts. Or, Eve quickly realises, any facts at all. Everything she’s been working off so far is just hearsay and Eve is more than aware that out of everybody she knows at MI6, the person most likely to invent a crazy story like this for female attention is Hugo.

Eve sweeps up all of her research into a single stack of paper and tucks it back inside the folder, ready to take back into work. She decides that the first thing she is going to do tomorrow is approach Carolyn Martens directly, despite Bill’s warning against doing exactly that. If she can get a firsthand account of what happened from Carolyn to add to her notes, and perhaps even get the chance to present her current research, maybe she will be able to investigate further and find out who this mysterious assassin is.

Niko is still awake when Eve steps into the bedroom a few moments later, bathed in the light of his bedside lamp as he reads a Tom Clancy novel. Eve knows that he is specifically waiting up for her because he normally has a strict rule about going to sleep at ten thirty on a school night and it’s already ten to eleven.

“You’re up later than usual,” Eve comments, as she roots around in her dresser for a pair of pyjamas.

“I was hoping I could make it up to you,” says Niko, folding down the top corner to mark his page and setting the book aside on his nightstand.

“Isn’t it a bit late for that?” asks Eve, though she knows that Niko would probably be done by eleven if they skipped out any proper foreplay. “Besides, I’m actually quite tired.”

“It’s not about the mark, is it?” Niko asks. “Because I can keep my t-shirt on if that’s still an issue.”

Eve shakes her head and pretends to stifle a yawn as she crosses the bedroom to the door that leads into the ensuite.

“I’m just really tired. Another night, maybe.”

Quickly locking herself in the bathroom before Niko can protest, Eve drapes her pyjamas over the edge of the bathtub and stands in front of the sink as she turns on the hot water. As she lets it warm up, she takes in her reflection in the mirror over the sink and runs her hands through her wild hair in a meagre attempt to tame it. It’s futile - Eve’s curls have always had a mind of their own.

With the water now running hot, Eve removes her shirt and cups her hands under the water to splash her face, but as she looks down, something black on her stomach catches her attention.

No.

No way.

No  _ fucking  _ way.

It’s a -

Well, it’s a mark. A large capital ‘V’, perhaps three inches tall and sitting just to the left of her navel. Eve blinks several times, half expecting it to disappear, but it doesn’t. It’s hard to get a clear view looking down at her body from above, so Eve glances back at the mirror and sees it in her reflection too, black against her skin and definitely brand new. Eve dressed in a hurry this morning, but she is certain that she wouldn’t have missed a mark this size on her own abdomen.

Which means it appeared today.

Jesus Christ, hasn’t Eve had enough excitement in the last twenty-four hours without this cherry on top of the cake?

Eve’s first thought is that she is never going to be able to wear a bikini again. The mark is  _ huge  _ and is sure to draw the attention of anybody who sees it. Eve knows that marks come in different shapes sizes and fonts - Niko’s mark, for example, that brought with it so much anguish for Eve this time yesterday, was just a small thing on his shoulder that could only be seen from up close and seems an insignificant problem compared to what Eve is looking at on her own body.

What can the ‘V’ possibly stand for?

It could be anybody. It’s just Eve’s luck that when she finally gets her mark, she doesn’t have a clue who the soulmate actually is. She can narrow it down to the city of London, but that still gives her nearly nine million options. Or even worse, what if it is somebody only here on business, or a tourist? Eve has no hope of being able to track them down again.

It’s not like she  _ needs _ to know who it is. She has Niko, who has already assured her that his own mark changes nothing between them.

Except she  _ does _ need to know who it is. She  _ really _ needs to know, for the sake of her own sanity. Eve hasn’t waited over forty years for a mark, just to continue not knowing who the universe has designated as her soulmate.

It’s natural curiosity. Anybody who would say otherwise in her situation would be an outright liar.

A knock on the bathroom door startles Eve and Niko’s voice calls out through the door, asking, “Are you okay in there? You’ve been in there a while and I can hear the water still running.”

Eve hastily reaches for her pyjama top and pulls it over her head and down over her stomach to cover the mark. She is grateful that she chose a dark coloured top, because she is certain that the mark would be visible through a white one. Niko can’t know about this yet, not until Eve has had time to process it herself first.

“I’m fine,” she calls back. “Just washing my face.”

Eve splashes her hands noisily under the water, hoping that Niko hears it and leaves her alone to finish getting ready for bed.

A  _ mark _ though. Eve has long since stopped believing that it would ever happen to her. She lifts up the hem of her top again to get another look at it and runs her finger over the lower point of the ‘V’, as if expecting it to wipe off like a whiteboard marker. It doesn’t budge.

As she lets the hem of her top fall down to cover the mark again and continues getting changed into her pyjamas, Eve knows that she should probably be planning how to tell Niko about what she has found. But instead she has two other questions on her mind.

Who is ‘V’ and how the fuck is Eve going to find them again?


	3. a little hobby of mine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little bit nsfw at the beginning of this chapter.
> 
> I've also shared some Very Professional Edits (or not) of Villanelle and Eve's marks on twitter if your interested in seeing roughly what they look like.

This woman is loud.

Like, there’s regular loud, and then there is Loud with a capital ‘L’.

This woman is  _ Loud _ .

Villanelle doesn’t like it.

It’s usually the straight ones who are noisy. Years of heterosexual sex has a habit of making some women feel like they have to perform for their partners, like they have to react in certain ways to being touched, like they have to make certain noises, just so their partner feels like they are doing a good job.

Villanelle doesn’t need any of that. She already knows that she is doing a good job without any of the auditory assurances.

There are so many other telltale signs, obvious to anybody who is as well-versed in the human form as Villanelle is. There are the unmissable signs, the sticky gush of arousal over her fingertips, thighs clenching and back arching and eyes rolling back into their head - even the most incompetent lover would be able to notice those things. But then there are the subtleties too, the fluttering of a pulse beneath the skin if you know where to look for it, skin flushing and hairs standing on end, the slight change in their tone of voice as they rasp out a pleading cry for more. Villanelle could even swear that a woman tastes different when she is just about to come.

Mostly though, it’s the look in their eyes. As much as Villanelle loves to go down on a woman, she enjoys it even more when it’s her fingers doing the work, or even an extra appendage attached to her hips, when she is able to hold her face above her partner’s and watch as the girl she’s fucking tumbles into bliss, pupils dilating so wide that they could swallow the world.

It’s not too dissimilar to when she kills somebody. Eyes are the gateway to the soul and Villanelle gets such a thrill from watching how that soul responds to her own actions. When she makes a person come, their soul explodes outwards through their eyes, taking over their entire body until the trembling stops. When she kills somebody, the soul crushes in on itself, squeezing that last surprised look of realisation that this is the end until there is nothing left but black.

That guy this afternoon, for example. He had no idea what was coming to him. After all, why would a lowly waitress want to kill him?

Well, an ordinary waitress probably  _ wouldn’t _ want to kill him, not unless he had terrible manners or he left an exceptionally meagre tip. Unluckily for him, Villanelle is not an ordinary waitress.

“Fuck. Oh fuck, baby. Yeah, just like that. Fuck me just like that.”

Villanelle suppresses an eye roll as she dips her tongue lower and uses her arms to pull the womans’ legs tighter around her head in the hope that her thighs will block out some of the outrageous sounds spilling from her lips. Honestly, it’s almost as if she thinks this is an audition for the adult movie industry, not a meaningless hookup that Villanelle is bound to push from her mind within a few hours of it happening.

“Fuck me, baby,” she continues, her words interspersed with a wail that is only marginally less resonant than before Villanelle started trying to use her thighs as ear defenders. “Fuck. Oh, god!”

The amount of noise she is making really is quite excessive. Villanelle wouldn’t be surprised if her screams have not only woken up the rest of the hotel, but also the rest of London.

Luckily, Villanelle has an ace up her sleeve. She manoeuvres her arm so that she can drive two fingers inside the woman and curls them, easily locating the spot that Villanelle knows sends women wild at the same time as she wraps her lips around an aching clit. The reaction is almost instantaneous. With one final choked cry, one that is most definitely genuine this time, the woman’s back arches off the bed and her thigh muscles spasm around Villanelle’s shoulders as she brings her through the climax.

“You’re really good at that,” says the girl, running a hand through her unkempt hair as she sits up against the pillows to look at Villanelle.

Villanelle crawls up the bed and lets her hands drop to the fastening on her own trousers, pushing them down her legs until they pool around her knees.

“Go down on me,” Villanelle says to the girl, rolling over so that she is lying on her back as she starts to undo the buttons on her shirt.

The girl is compliant, for which Villanelle is grateful, and helps to pull the trousers the rest of the way down her legs while Villanelle makes quick work of her shirt.

Villanelle always gets like this after a kill. There’s been an edge since lunchtime, a hunger that has needed to be sated since she killed that man in the restaurant. It’s become a bit of a routine for Villanelle after a job, to go out and find a person or people who can help her take that edge off. Sometimes it’s enough just to fuck another person, to get them to submit control over to her, but other times she needs to actually physically get off for it to simmer down.

She could send the girl packing and get the job done herself, but it would be much quicker and more convenient to use-

“Who is EP?”

Villanelle lifts her head from the pillow as the girl’s words intrude into her thoughts.

“What?” she asks, confused as to why the girl is sitting between her legs but has not yet removed Villanelle’s underwear. Villanelle thought she had been quite clear about what she wanted when she asked the girl to go down on her.

“EP,” the girl repeats. “Your soulmate?”

“My what?” Villanelle asks, because she doesn’t have a soulmate, but then her eyes fall upon the large black letters on her abdomen that the girl is pointing at - ‘EP’.

That can’t be right. Villanelle doesn’t have a soulmate - she is, and always has been, a lone wolf. Soulmates are for other people, people who are stupid enough to let their lives be dictated by pointless letters on their bodies.

Villanelle has never once stopped to consider the possibility that  _ she _ could have a soulmate out there. 

She doesn’t even like other people. Sure, she likes pretty people and she likes people who tell her how amazing she is and she likes dead people, but she doesn’t actually like  _ people. _ How can there be a person who shares a part of her? A person who, by some cruel twist of destiny, Villanelle is supposed to belong to?

Villanelle doesn’t belong to anybody but herself.

And apparently to this ‘EP’ person.

Could it be this girl? God, Villanelle hopes not.

She had probably better check, just in case.

“What was your name again?”

A flash of annoyance crosses the girl’s features, as if Villanelle was supposed to have remembered her name from the first time she asked, but it is gone almost as soon as it appears.

“Poppy.”

Not this girl then. Well, that’s a relief.

Villanelle doesn’t like this. She enjoys being in control, whether that control is over people or things, but she especially likes having control of herself and her own choices.

This is not a choice. These letters are trying to make a decision for her.

How fucking rude.

It’s also unsettlingly  _ normal _ .

Villanelle has never been normal before. In fact, everybody throughout her life has gone out of their way to tell her that she isn’t normal. Family, teachers, psychologists. Even the people that she works for now. She has never been normal to anybody.

Until now. Villanelle has a soulmate now.

Villanelle wonders who ‘EP’ actually is. It could be any number of people. Villanelle can’t even remember the faces of most of the new people she met today, though if she had known that today would be the day that she met her soulmate, she would have perhaps paid them slightly more attention. It could have been anybody in the bar she visited this evening, somebody that she could very easily have ended up bringing back to the hotel with her instead of the screamer. Then there were all the people in the restaurant, the other servers or a chef or even one of the customers. Or just a random stranger on the streets of London. It could be  _ anybody. _

Or…

Or the woman in the coffee shop that she visited just before she started her shift in the restaurant. Villanelle had almost forgotten about her until now, forcing herself to recount every interaction she has had today, but the woman’s face swims to the front of her mind as clearly as if she is standing in front of her. Villanelle had been so angry when somebody had bumped into her from behind and she turned around with every intention of losing her shit. But then her eyes fell upon an angel with incredible hair and how could she possibly have stayed mad at somebody who looks like that?

“Do you still want me to-?”

“I think you should get dressed and leave,” says Villanelle, distancing herself from the girl and rolling off the bed. She accidentally steps on the girl’s discarded bra and gingerly picks it up between her thumb and forefinger before throwing it on the bed.

As the girl whose name Villanelle has already forgotten gets dressed behind her, Villanelle stands in front of the floor length mirror in just her underwear, admiring reflection of the mark on her stomach. The letters are two inches tall and take up quite a bit of space to the left of her navel, black writing that stands out against her pale skin. The mark really isn’t subtle at all, like whoever ‘EP’ is wants to mark their territory on her body. Villanelle is at least grateful that it has appeared in a place that will be covered by clothes most of the time. And luckily for her, she’s never really been into wearing crop tops.

Villanelle wonders if EP has a mark too,  _ her _ mark. She presses the flat of her hand against her stomach over the mark, hoping that it will bring her closer to EP, or at least provide her with some clarity regarding their identity.

“Can I give you my number?” the girl asks, rudely interrupting Villanelle’s thoughts as she bats her eyelashes at Villanelle in a way that she probably thinks is cute and will earn her a yes.

“I don’t think so,” Villanelle answers. And then, because the girl still hasn’t left, she adds, “Don’t forget your shoes.”

The girl leaves without another word and finally -  _ finally _ \- Villanelle is left alone.

Fuck, imagine if it  _ is _ the woman from the coffee shop? 

Villanelle traces her fingertips over the contours of the letters and feels her arousal start to build again, starting as a low thrum concentrated between her legs, before it spreads out across every inch of her body, causing hairs to stand on end and her whole being to feel alive with electricity. 

There’s a very expensive vibrator in her suitcase but Villanelle knows that her hands alone will be enough tonight, that the image of the woman from the cafe burned onto her eyelids and the reflection of those two letters etched onto her skin have already brought her close to the edge without even being touched. She sends a hand down her stomach and toys with the waistband of her underwear, while the fingers of her other hand trace the letters over and over again.

The woman’s face swims to the front of her mind again and Villanelle imagines it before her. What would her lips taste like? What kind of kisser would she be? A good one, Villanelle decides. She would be a fantastic kisser with lips like those. 

Would she get to her knees when Villanelle asked her to, or would she try to take back some of the control back for herself? Fuck, Villanelle feels fresh arousal seep through the material of her underwear at the thought of the woman fighting with Villanelle for power. Villanelle would perhaps indulge her for a bit, but then she would bury her hands in that majestic mane of hair and guide the woman’s mouth between her legs.

Villanelle lets out a choked moan at the thought and lets her fingers slide beneath the elastic to cup her own cunt. She is unbelievably wet, making any attempt at friction where she needs it almost impossible but the glide of fingertips across a straining clit is almost enough,  _ almost _ , until they dip lower still and she pushes one easily inside. The angle is awkward from where the lace of her panties restricts her movement, but she curls her finger inside herself, then withdraws it and slides back in with two effortlessly.

This is the benefit, Villanelle somehow manages to think to herself, of getting the job done herself rather than asking the girl who was here earlier to do it for her. She knows exactly what she likes, knows which curl of her fingers will bring that peak closer, knows when to pull out and start rubbing furious circles around her clit, knows when to press her fingers of her other hand against the mark on her stomach and then she is coming, oh  _ god _ she’s coming with the force of a hurricane sweeping through her veins and leaving her entire body in ruins.

Her free hand jerks out and her palm collides with the wall beside the mirror, perhaps the only thing stopping her from collapsing in a boneless puddle on the carpeted floor. Villanelle manages to take a couple of shaky steps backwards before the tremors have yet subsided and flops back onto the mattress, the hand in her underwear still pulling out fresh aftershocks with each diminishing rub of her clit.

When the orgasm finally subsides, Villanelle lets out a slow breath laced with a hint of a chuckle. Villanelle has always sneered on other people and their marks, but for the first time ever, she might possibly get it.

Who knew that having a soulmate would feel  _ that  _ good?

* * *

“Elena, thank god you’re here,” Eve says, almost as soon as she arrives at work the next day. “You’ll never guess what!”

Elena glances up from her computer and her expression doesn’t convey nearly the right amount of excitement for the news that Eve is about to impart.

“You’re absolutely right,” says Elena. “I won’t guess, so you’d better just tell me.”

Eve deposits her bag at her desk and then haphazardly drapes her coat over the back of her chair, before she hurries over to Elena’s desk, unbuttoning her blouse in the process.

“Wow, Eve,” says Elena, her eyes going wide with surprise. “I know we’re good friends, but buy me a drink first.”

Ignoring Elena’s protest, Eve unbuttons her shirt right the way to the bottom and then pulls it open, her eagerness to show the ‘V’ on her abdomen far outweighing any qualms she has about flashing Elena. Eve deliberately picked out one of her nicer bras today for a reason.

“Look what I found last night!” she announces excitedly, stepping closer to Elena, though the letter is so big that Eve could stand on the other side of the room and Elena wouldn’t be able to miss it.

“Is that-?”

“Good  _ god, _ Eve,” says Bill, entering the office behind Eve and recoiling when he notices Eve’s state of semi-undress. “I don’t need to send you for sexual harassment training, do I?”

Eve ignores him and continues to let Elena peer at the mark.

“Shit, Eve, that’s  _ enormous.” _

Bill drops into his chair with a sigh and arches his eyebrow at the two women as he asks, “Do I even want to know?”

“I got my mark, Bill. Look!” Eve moves closer to Bill’s desk so that he can see her mark too, and then continues, “And I’m positive it wasn’t there yesterday morning, which means it appeared at some point during the day yesterday.”

“So you met your soulmate yesterday?” asks Elena.

“That’s right.”

“And do you know who it is?”

Eve glances down at her stomach and traces a finger over the letter, as if doing so will bring her closer to the person it refers to.

“Not a clue,” she answers.

“For crying out loud, Eve, put it away,” complains Bill, shielding his eyes from Eve’s state of undress.

“Sorry.”

There is an awkward moment of silence as Eve buttons up her blouse and the other two pretend that they haven’t just seen a very unprofessional amount of Eve’s skin, before Bill finally speaks up.

“Just one letter is a little bit unusual, isn’t it?” he asks. “Most people get at least two.”

“That’s what I thought,” agrees Eve, tucking her shirt back into the waistband of her office trousers and smoothing down the fabric so that the creases she missed with the iron aren’t as noticeable. “What kind of person only has one name?”

“Beyoncé?” suggests Elena. “Oprah?”

“Some footballers go by a mononym,” adds Bill.

“This is  _ my _ soulmate we’re talking about, Bill. I can guarantee they aren’t a professional athlete.”

“True,” says Elena, humming with agreement. “The only exercise that Eve does is running for the bus.”

“Hey!” protests Eve, despite the truth to Elena’s words.

“Oh, this might interest you two,” says Bill, peering at the screen of his computer. “They’ve sent an email around to all team leaders. ‘Please pass the following message on to your teams. We are deeply saddened to announce the unexpected passing of Paul McIntosh. We understand that many people, particularly those who worked closely with Paul, will be shocked by his sudden death, however we are unable to release more information until the official investigation has been concluded.’ And then there’s a bit of a eulogy about his achievements - I can forward the email onto both of you if you’re interested.”

“So he really did get murdered,” says Elena, shaking her head in disbelief. “That’s crazy.”

Eve glances at her watch, then bends down to lift her folder of research out of her bag.

“I’m going to try to catch Carolyn before she gets sucked into any meetings,” she announces.

“Eve,” Bill warms her, with a stern look. “What did I tell you yesterday?”

“No, hear me out,” Eve cuts him off with a defiant shake of her head. “Hugo said it was a waitress who did it. A  _ woman. _ And I-” Eve trails off, pausing momentarily as she wrestles with whether or not she should confide in the other two about her research, before she gives in. “And I’ve been studying female psychopaths in my free time. I’ve been studying  _ this  _ psychopath. I’ve got tons of information about other assassinations I think she’s responsible for, and-”

“Hang on,” Bill interrupts, holding up a hand to stop Eve from continuing to talk. He waits a few seconds, the silence lingering between them as Eve prepares herself for a steely telling off, before he eventually asks, “Why aren’t you this enthusiastic about your  _ actual _ job?”

“Because this is  _ exciting,” _ Eve tells him, her entire body alive. “A female contract killer, Bill, and we know virtually nothing about her.”

Bill signs in resignation and asks, “I don’t suppose it’ll stop you if I tell you again not to go to Carolyn?”

Eve tries to shoot Bill an apologetic look as she shakes her head at him.

“Be quick,” he tells her, gesturing towards the door with a nod of his head.

“Thank you,” says Eve, clutching her folder to her chest as she hurries out of the office.

* * *

Carolyn Martens has a private office two floors up from where Eve works. Eve finds it pretty easily, the plaque on the door with Carolyn’s name engraved into it telling her that she’s found the right room, but is disappointed to find it empty. Not quite ready to give up, Eve wanders down the hallway, peering through the small panes on the other doors to see if Carolyn is visiting a colleague, and eventually finds the woman herself making a cup of tea in a communal kitchen. 

“Uh, Carolyn?” Eve tentatively asks, hovering in the doorway between the kitchen and the corridor outside.

Carolyn looks up from her mug, which is patriotically decorated with a Union flag, and raises both eyebrows at Eve, as if expecting her to continue.

“My name is Eve Polastri,” Eve hurriedly explains, her heart almost pounding out of her chest with nerves. “I heard from somebody that you were having lunch with Paul McIntosh when he - well,  _ you know _ \- and I wanted to say … I wanted to show you…”

“I’m a busy woman, Eve,” interjects Carolyn, gesturing with her hand for Eve to hurry up and get to her point.

Eve steps fully into the kitchen and places her folder down on the counter next to Carolyn, then opens it up and spreads some of her research out so that Carolyn can see it.

“I’ve been collecting information on a female assassin that has been striking across Europe and I believe that she is responsible for what happened to Paul,” says Eve, glancing up at Carolyn and digging her teeth into her lower lip as she waits for Carolyn to react. 

Carolyn raises a hand to the glasses hanging on a string around her neck and lifts them onto her nose, peering down at Eve’s research. She seems to scan through it quickly, shuffling some of the sheets on the top aside so that she can see what is underneath.

“We’re unaware of any new assassins on the scene, particularly not a female one,” says Carolyn. “What makes you believe that these have all been carried out by the same woman?”

“She’s a show-off,” Eve explains. “And probably a narcissist. She kills publicly and in unusual and often violent ways. I mean, stabbed through the heart in a central London restaurant during the lunchtime peak? It’s like she’s trying to test the limits of what she can get away with.”

The longer that Carolyn spends flicking through the research, the more self-conscious Eve becomes. Carolyn’s silence only makes things worse and Eve starts to doubt her decision to even bring this to Carolyn’s attention in the first place. Perhaps Bill was right in warning her against it.

“And this is what you do when you should be working?” Carolyn eventually asks, looking up at Eve.

“I did most of it after work or during my lunch break,” Eve attempts to justify herself. “It’s … it’s a little hobby of mine, I guess.”

“And who do you work under?”

Eve has a nagging suspicion that she may be about to get both herself and Bill in trouble.

“I’m in Bill Pargrave’s team.”

“Can I take this?” asks Carolyn, collecting Eve’s research up into a single pile and tucking it back inside the folder.

“This is months of research…” Eve begins, protective over her hard work and wary that if it gets confiscated or passed onto the people investigating Paul’s death, she may never see it again and be back to square one.

“Eve, this is a comprehensive insight into an assassin who, for all intents and purposes, we had no idea was operating until yesterday,” says Carolyn. “This could be incredibly useful in tracking her down.”

Eve’s cheeks flush slightly at what she thinks might be a compliment.

“If you think it’ll be useful,” she reluctantly agrees, with a nod. Another thought pops into her mind and she decides that there is very little to lose by voicing it. “Would I be able to help? With the investigation, I mean. I’ve done all this research so far and I’d really like the chance to be able to follow through.”

Carolyn shoots Eve a look, half grimace and half pity, before she says, “I’m really not in a position to be making calls like that yet.”

Disappointed, Eve nods anyway and says, “I understand.”

Unsure what else to say, Eve hovers nearby as Carolyn stirs her mug of tea, then drops the spoon into a sink that is already halfway full with unwashed crockery. As Carolyn picks up Eve’s folder on one hand and the tea with her other, she seems surprised when she goes to leave the kitchen and finds Eve still here.

“Well, don’t you have a job to be getting back to?” asks Carolyn, both eyebrows raised.

“Yes! Sorry!”

Eve hurries out of the room ahead of Carolyn, wondering if she’ll ever see her research again.


	4. you cannot fight destiny

After a little bit of consideration and many excellent orgasms, Villanelle decides that she likes her mark. It’s still a bit of a surprise to see the letters emblazoned on her skin, but she is getting used to the sight and she could probably trace the letters ‘EP’ with her fingertips in her sleep.

She dreams of the woman from the coffee shop. Villanelle has decided that it has to be her. Her soulmate, after all, has to be somebody who is special. It’s not going to be a forgettable face in a sea of thousands, what kind of cruel prank from fate would that be? And this woman is far from unforgettable - in fact, she is the only face that Villanelle can remember at all now apart from her own. 

There had been something electric between them when their eyes locked during that brief encounter. Villanelle had initially written it off as physical attraction when they first met, a spark of lust sizzling between them, and then it had gone as they each continued about their respective days. But the more she thinks about it, the more she realises that it was more intense than that. Sure, the woman was attractive and exactly Villanelle’s type, but lots of women fit that description and none of them have ever caused her to break out into a sweat each time she recalls their seconds-long interaction.

In fact, now that she comes to think about it, she never normally recalls the women after they’ve parted ways at all.

She has also never come as many times in succession as she did by her own hand last night while thinking about that woman’s face between her legs.

Now  _ that  _ has to count for something.

Could it be that after so many years of being told she would never be normal enough to have a soulmate, one has finally shown up in the form of an Asian woman with amazing hair?

The way to be absolutely certain, of course, is to find the woman again. 

Villanelle spends almost two hours getting ready to go out because she’ll be damned if she bumps into her soulmate for the second time looking anything less than incredible. Half of that time is spent in her hotel room’s large clawfoot bathtub, where she meticulously shaves her legs while wearing a face mask that promises to make her skin glow with youthful iridescence. It’s effective enough that she hardly needs to bother with makeup, though she does touch up her brows and subtly contours to accent her cheekbones.

The outfit she chooses is sure to catch EP’s attention. Villanelle’s closet is full of designer outfits bought especially for her trip to London but for this particular outing, she selects a Dolce and Gabbanna two piece suit crafted from expensive black silk and embellished with embroidered gold flowers. Villanelle straightens her hair and ties it back in a sleek low ponytail, then completes her look with a dash of bold red lipstick that matches her shoes.

“Beautiful,” Villanelle says, admiring herself in the floor length mirror.

Villanelle challenges anybody, soulmate or not, to say that she doesn’t look amazing.

* * *

Villanelle returns to the coffee shop where she met the woman just before midday. She is working purely off the assumption that the woman works locally and hopes that she buys her lunch here everyday, which is why Villanelle orders herself a cappuccino and a sandwich from the counter and then finds a seat at the table in the corner by the window. With her back to the wall, Villanelle not only has a view of the entire coffee shop, including the line at the counter, but also of the street outside through the window.

She feels a little bit as though she is on a stakeout. Perhaps she should have dressed up for the part - dark unassuming clothing, a hat with a wide brim to conceal her face, maybe even a pair of sunglasses to mask her eyes. Villanelle does enjoy expanding her repertoire of character work, after all.

But no, it’s probably better like this. If that woman  _ is _ EP, then the first time she met Villanelle was when she was disguised as Lulu the waitress. Villanelle wants her second encounter with her soulmate to take place when she is dressed as herself. 

She is certainly catching attention dressed like this. Villanelle loves a good suit - for starters, wearing a power suit has a tendency to intimidate men into giving her a wide berth, whilst simultaneously having the opposite effect on women.

The two girls sitting a few tables away from her are a perfect example. Villanelle is not oblivious to the way that they both started checking her out when she entered the coffee shop, nor to their hushed whispers as they keep sparing glances in her direction since she sat down. They’re a little young for her taste, but she appreciates the attention nonetheless and deliberately makes eye contact with the prettier dark-haired girl on the left, smiling to herself in triumph when the girl quickly looks away with a flush to her cheeks.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Distracted by the girls, Villanelle almost topples off her seat in surprise as a fist slams down on her table, rattling the pot of condiments and cutlery. Villanelle looks up to find Konstantin looming over the table, wrapped up in his signature black duffle coat and wearing an angry scowl on his face.

“Eating lunch,” Villanelle answers, recovering quickly so that Konstantin cannot linger on her initial surprise at seeing him. “What the hell are  _ you _ doing?”

Konstantin doesn’t wait for an invitation to sit down. Instead he pulls back the chair opposite Villanelle and drops into it, leaning both arms on the table between them and clasping his hands together to show that he is about to tell her off.

“You are supposed to be back in Paris,” Konstantin scolds her. “You should have been on a train yesterday afternoon.”

Villanelle just shrugs his reprimand away. 

“You know how I get after I kill. I needed to let off some steam.”

“So you disobey direct orders just so you can have sex?” asks Konstantin, arching a judgemental eyebrow at her.

“Do not slut shame me, Konstantin,” Villanelle says, plucking a cherry tomato out of her side salad with her fingers and popping it into her mouth. “Besides, I am on holiday. London is a great city.”

Villanelle’s opinion of London, which is mostly just full of puddles and grumpy people, has improved dramatically since the discovery that her soulmate is here.

“This is not a holiday!” says Konstantin, shooting her an irritated glare. He lowers his voice and then adds, “MI6 is just around the corner. The man you killed died only a few streets away. Do you know how incredibly stupid it is for you to eat your lunch here?”

“Relax,” Villanelle tells him. “I was in disguise. Nobody will recognise me.” 

“You do not know that.”

“I do.” Villanelle leans across the table excitedly and says to Konstantin, “Anyway, enough about you. I have big news to share. I have a soulmate! And I think I met her here.”

Konstantin’s eyes go wide with disbelief.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “You do not have a soulmate.”

“Do you want me to show you my mark?” asks Villanelle, bringing a hand to touch the place on her stomach where the mark is through the material of her blazer. “It’s right here.”

Konstantin’s eyes flicker down to her hand, then back up to her face.

“That is not a soulmate, that is a distraction,” he says, his eyes steely with concern. “Remember who you are, Villanelle. You are ruthless, you are focused, you are-” 

“I am in love,” Villanelle cuts in, shooting him a sappy smile. 

“Oh, really?” Konstantin scorns her. “Then what is her name?”

Villanelle manages to hold his gaze for a few seconds, before she can feel him judging her and instinctively looks away. Suddenly her sandwich is looking particularly tasty, and she picks it up and takes a huge bite to avoid having to say anything in response to his question. 

“I think I will hold off on buying a new suit for the wedding then,” Konstantin eventually says. 

Villanelle swallows her mouthful, and then asks, “Do you have one? Is that why you’re in a bad mood, because you’re pissed off that I have a soulmate and you don’t?”

“I have a soulmate,” Konstantin answers defensively.

“It’s not your wife though, is it?” Villanelle asks, leaning forward in her seat and narrowing her eyes at him.

Konstantin looks away, unable to maintain eye contact with her, and Villanelle knows that her guess is correct.

“You need to leave London,” he says, diverting the topic away from himself. Reaching into the inside pocket of his coat, he pulls out a postcard, which he slides across the table to her. “You have another job to do.”

“So soon?” Villanelle asks, picking up the postcard and absent-mindlessly scanning the picture on the front and the meaningless message on the back.

“They are impressed with your work,” says Konstantin. He shoots her a warning glare and adds, “Do not give them a reason to be disappointed with you.”

Villanelle lets her gaze wander out through the window, hoping that she’ll spot the woman with the amazing hair walking past at any moment. There are lots of pedestrians passing by, but none of them are familiar.

“You cannot fight destiny, Konstantin,” says Villanelle, returning her attention to him. “We’ll find each other again. She’s my soulmate and that is how it works.”

“That’s not how it works,” Konstantin counters grumpily.

“Stop shitting on my good mood.” Villanelle picks up her half-eaten sandwich and takes a large bite, chewing noisily as she asks, “Are you done now? Can I enjoy my lunch in peace?”

Konstantin frowns at her disapprovingly for a few final seconds, before he pushes back his chair and gets to his feet.

“They are watching you,” he warns her. “No more misbehaving.”

With her mouth still full of chewed-up chunks of sandwich, Villanelle retorts loudly, “I never misbehave!”

* * *

It’s been over twenty-four hours since Eve presented Carolyn with her theory that Paul’s killer is the same woman who has carried out a series of assassinations across Europe, and Eve is just about to give up hope of ever seeing her folder of research again, when Carolyn sweeps into the office with complete authority.

“Carolyn, hi!” says Eve, dropping the fork she has been using to pick through the tupperware box of Niko’s leftover stir fry that is her lunch and getting to her feet to greet Carolyn.

On the other side of the office, Bill, who is also eating his own lunch at his desk while he continues to work, looks up from his computer to see what is going on.

“Back in my day, they used to cram six of us in these offices,” Carolyn comments, as she stands near the door and looks around the room as if inspecting it. “Rather spacious with just three, don’t you think?”

Carolyn turns her head to address Eve with this question.

“Uh, I guess so,” answers Eve, having never really considered the layout of their office before. 

“You could quite easily fit another desk in here,” adds Carolyn, gesturing to the large empty space between Bill’s desk and the door. She crosses over to Eve’s desk and it is only then that Eve realises that Carolyn has her folder of research tucked under her arm. “Your research. I’ve decided to assign the investigation to this team. With your apparent expertise in the area of female assassins, it seems only appropriate that you should…”

“Hang on,” interrupts Bill, a frown on his face. “What about our normal work? I don’t believe that Frank would approve of this decision.”

Frank - Bill’s boss - is always rather sour-faced and very rarely has positive words to say about the team and their work. Eve is convinced that his decade long vendetta against Bill for no particular reason is why they always get assigned the dullest intelligence gathering briefs.

“I’ve bypassed Frank,” explains Carolyn. “This is a high priority. We need to know who wanted Paul dead and why.”

“High priority and you’re giving it to  _ us?” _ Bill asks incredulously.

Carolyn mouth presses into a thin line as she frowns and explains, “Yes, well unfortunately MI6 is still a bit of an old boys’ club, especially at the top. They’re willing to admit that Paul was killed by a woman, but when I put forward your theory that there could be a female assassin operating across Europe, they were rather dismissive. I’m using my own authority to ask you to investigate. You’ll still have to do some of your old work, but most of that will be reassigned to the other teams under Frank.”

Carolyn places the folder of research down on Eve’s desk and Eve immediately places a protective hand over it, as if worried that it may get confiscated from her if she doesn’t keep a careful eye on it. Perhaps she should make secret copies of all her notes, just in case Carolyn changes her mind along the line and takes the investigation away from them.

“So it’s our job to find her?” asks Bill.

“Who she is,” confirms Carolyn with a brusque nod. “Who she works for. Why do they want these particular people dead? I want to know everything about her.”

“So do I,” blurts out Eve. 

Even just the idea of this woman thrills Eve to her core. Eve needs to find out who she is, this enigma of a woman who is almost entirely anonymous. Her curiosity will not be satisfied until she can piece together the full picture of this assassin and her life, which is why Eve is beyond excited that it is now her job to find out everything she can about her.

“Excellent,” says Carolyn. She looks as if she is about to leave the office, before adding as an afterthought, “Oh, and Eve? As you can probably imagine, the higher-ups have got their beady little eyes on this case. The assassination of a senior operative has stirred up quite a bit of interest. Don’t cock it up.”

Behind Carolyn, Elena enters the room with a Tesco meal deal in her hands, only stopping when she realises who is in their office. She does a weird half-curtsey towards Carolyn as she shuffles past, bowing her head as she says, “Oh, hi! It’s such an honour to meet you, Ms Martens.”

“Call me Carolyn, please,” says Carolyn, before making a swift departure from their office.

Elena stares after Carolyn’s retreating form until she has disappeared from view, then turns to Eve with her eyes wide with glee.

“She said I could call her Carolyn!”

“Well, that is her name,” Bill comments drily.

Ignoring him, and with an expression of wonder still on her face as if she can’t yet believe the seconds-long encounter with her workplace hero, Elena asks Eve, “What did she want?”

Eve holds up her folder of research and then, fighting a smile of her own, says, “We’ve got an assassin to hunt.”

* * *

“I feel like I’ve hardly seen you recently,” says Niko, as they both get ready for bed on Friday night at the end of a week that has been eventful, to say the least. “You’re not avoiding me because of the mark, are you?”

Eve’s heart actually stops in her chest for a moment because she thinks that Niko has somehow managed to find out about the large ‘V’ on her stomach that she hasn’t yet shown him, before she remembers that he also got his mark earlier in the week. It seems like an entire lifetime has passed since he showed her the letters, so long ago that Eve can’t even really remember why she was so upset about them. Her own mark, several times the size of Niko’s despite having half the number of letters, has overshadowed his somewhat in Eve’s list of priorities.

“No,” Eve shakes her head. “Of course not. I’m just really busy with work. My team has just been assigned a really big investigation.” Eve pauses as she wonders how much she should share with Niko, then decides to tell him anyway. “We’re tracking down an assassin.”

“An assassin?” repeats Niko, his eyebrows shooting up across his forehead. “That sounds dangerous.”

“It’s really not. It’s not as if we’re going to come face to face with her. We’re just trying to figure out who she is and why she’s killing.”

“She?”

Now in her pyjamas, Eve tosses her dirty clothes in the laundry hamper and peels back the covers so she can climb into bed.

“Yeah,” Eve enthuses, as she plumps up her pillows and settles back against them. “It’s a woman.”

“You sound excited,” says Niko, as he climbs into the other side of the bed.

“Well, it  _ is _ exciting,” confesses Eve. “They asked  _ me _ to investigate. It’s a pretty big deal.”

“Then I’m happy for you,” says Niko, rolling onto his side and propping his body weight up on his elbow. He arches an eyebrow at her and Eve knows what is coming, even before he asks, “Do you want to maybe…?”

He doesn’t finish his question, instead he just leaves it hanging suggestively between them as his gaze flickers down Eve’s body and back up again. His eyes are dark with obvious lust and he reaches out with the arm that he isn’t leaning on to stroke up and down Eve’s forearm.

“Okay,” agrees Eve, because it’s Friday night so why not?

She pushes the covers further down the bed as Niko quickly shimmies out of his pyjama bottoms. He gets into position on top of Eve and begins stroking himself with one hand as he leans down to kiss her, the bristles of his mustache scratchy against her upper lip. His free hand gropes at Eve’s tit through the thin cotton of her t-shirt, then roams further down to the hem, where he starts to tug it upwards. 

As his fingertips brush across the sensitive skin of Eve’s lower abdomen, she remembers almost too late the enormous ‘V’ on her stomach and panics. Niko isn’t allowed to see her mark, not yet. He’ll have to know about it eventually, but Eve needs to keep this to herself for now, at least until she has planned what she will say to Niko when she shows him. But there’s also a selfish part of Eve that likes having this secret, and she wants to have the chance to figure out who her soulmate is before she gives herself that added pressure of Niko knowing that she has one.

Eve absolutely  _ cannot _ let him take her t-shirt off. But he will get suspicious if she suddenly changes her mind about the sex so soon after agreeing to it. She needs to find a believable reason to keep her top on while they do it, so that he doesn’t find the mark.

Or they could…

“Do it from behind,” says Eve, pushing herself up into a seated position with the intention of rolling onto her front and getting on all fours for him.

Niko’s bodyweight on top of her stops Eve from actually being able to roll over.

“I want to be able to see you,” he says, giving her a smile that would probably be sweet, if it weren’t for the fact that Eve’s brain has gone into panic mode about trying to keep her mark a secret from him.

His hands return to the hem of her shirt as he starts to peel it upwards, and Eve gets desperate.

“No!” she cries out, both hand grabbing the fabric and pulling it back down again.

But it might be too late. Niko’s eyes flit downwards as Eve scrambles to cover herself up and his eyebrows furrow together. Eve catches a tiny glimpse of the lower point of the ‘V’ as she pulls her hem down and she prays to a god that she doesn’t entirely believe in that Niko hasn’t also seen the mark.

“Hang on, what’s-?”

Eve’s heart sinks as she realises that gravity of the situation and wishes that she could rewind the last fifteen seconds. She’s just made things a million times worse for herself by trying to cover up the mark. If Niko had discovered it before, Eve could have at least feigned ignorance and pretended that she had simply forgotten to tell him about it. But now, Niko has caught her actively trying to hide it from him.

Niko rolls his body off Eve, a confused frown on his face.

“After all the shit you gave me the other night,  _ you’ve _ got one too?”

“I didn’t give you-” Eve starts, before deciding to take a different approach mid-sentence. She cuts herself off and defensively says, “Mine appeared after yours.”

“When?”

“Tuesday.” 

Niko’s gaze wanders down to where the cotton pyjama top covers the mark, and he asks, “Am I allowed to look at it?”

Eve hesitates, then reaches a reluctant hand down to the hem of her top and lifts it up to expose her stomach. As she does so, she glances away, staring at a spot on the ceiling by the window because she doesn’t think she’ll be able to stand seeing the expression on Niko’s face as he examines the mark for the first time.

“Jesus Christ, Eve.” She hears him let out a sigh, then he raises his voice slightly and demands, “How the fuck were you planning to hide that from me? It’s huge!” 

“I don’t know, okay!” protests Eve defensively. “I didn’t know how to tell you.”

“You deliberately hid this from me,” Niko accuses Eve, his voice laced with mixed disappointment and resentment. “You didn’t want me to find out. Do you know who it is?”

“I don’t have a clue! It’s probably just some stranger I sat next to on the bus!”

“But if you don’t know who it is then why not just tell me?” Niko asks.

“Because I panicked, okay?”

As Niko runs an exasperated hand through his shaggy hair, Eve wishes she knew what to say to make things better.

In the end, she settles for asking, “Do you still want to have sex?”

Niko lets out a breathy laugh and rolls his eyes, grabbing his discarded pyjama pants as he gets off the bed.

“I can’t even bear to look at you right now, Eve,” Niko says, as he steps into the pyjamas and pulls them back up his legs. 

He crosses over to the closet in the corner of the bedroom and flings the doors open wide, then rummages around at the top, before eventually taking out a spare pillow and a blanket.

“Where are you going?” asks Eve, sitting up on the edge of the mattress.

“I’m going nowhere.” He thrusts the bedding into Eve’s arms, then adds, “But you’re sleeping on the couch tonight.”

“Really?” demands Eve, scoffing and rolling her eyes at him. “We’re not even going to talk about this?”

“You’ve had three whole days to talk to me about this but you chose to be deceitful instead,” argues Niko, getting back into his side of the bed and rolling onto his side with his back to Eve.

“Well now you’re just being spiteful and immature,” she spits back at him.

“I’m not listening to you, Eve. Now can you please leave me alone so I can go to sleep?”

Eve opens her mouth to say something in response, but she closes it again when she realises that there is no point in trying to reason with Niko when he is like this. She can’t believe how rude he is being, so much the polar opposite of how he was acting just a few minutes ago when he thought they were about to have sex that Eve can hardly believe he’s the same man.

“You know what, Niko,” Eve shoots at him angrily as she wraps up the bedding in her arms and heads towards the bedroom door. “Gemma is welcome to you.”

And then she storms out, slamming the door behind her far louder than necessary, but knowing that it’s the only small victory that she can take from this argument.


	5. it's not fate, it's bullshit

“-and that’s how I ended up sleeping on the couch all weekend.”

Eve finishes relaying the story of the argument to Elena as the pair of them head to the morgue on Monday morning to get the results of the post-mortem on Paul’s body. Bill has elected to stay behind in the office, suggesting that it didn’t need all three of them to check out the body and that he could make a start on compiling an evidence board using Eve’s research.

“You know, Eve,” says Elena, as she pushes open the door to the morgue and steps inside ahead of Eve. “The more you tell me about you and Niko, the more you completely put me off the idea of marriage. It sounds like absolute hell.”

“It’s fine most of the time,” shrugs Eve. “Niko and I are just having a difficult week.”

“If you say so,” Elena replies. “I think I’ll give it a miss though. I like being young and single.” 

As they approach the front desk, Eve withdraws her MI6 identification pass from her coat pocket and shows it to the woman on duty. 

“Hi, my name is Eve Polastri and this is my colleague Elena Felton. We’re here about Paul McIntosh’s body.”

“Post-mortem results are usually emailed across within twenty-four to forty-eight hours,” explains the woman behind the desk.

“Carolyn Martens said it would be okay if we came down here in person,” adds Eve. Though it isn’t strictly true, Eve is hoping that name-dropping somebody as senior as Carolyn will earn them good favour. “We were wondering if we could take a look at the body ourselves too, if that’s possible?”

The receptionist eyes their security passes, then each of their faces in turn, before getting to her feet.

“I’ll ask a colleague to get the body ready for you,” she says. “Would you mind taking a seat while you wait?”

As the receptionist disappears to sort out their request, Eve takes a seat on one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs in the waiting area next to Elena.

“The more that I think about these marks, the more I realise that they are too much hassle for what they’re worth,” Elena says, a thoughtful frown on her face. “Look at yours, for instance.”

“That’s true,” agrees Eve. “My marriage would be so much simpler if neither of us got our marks.”

“I think the entire world would be a better place if people didn’t get them at all,” Elena says cynically. “I’ve seen it ruin so many people’s lives. Couples who try to force a relationship that isn’t working because they have each other’s marks. People who don’t give somebody a proper chance because they aren’t their soulmate. Couples like you and Niko whose relationships break down because one of them gets somebody else’s mark.”

“Niko and I aren’t breaking down,” counters Eve, ignoring the fact that she and Niko only exchanged a handful of words with each other all weekend following their argument on Friday night. “We’re just trying to adjust.”

“Not _yet,”_ points out Elena. “And what about the people whose marks aren’t reciprocated, or whose marks suddenly disappear one day. It’s not fate, it’s bullshit. The chances of it all working out are basically zero.”

“I feel sorry for anybody who ever discovers your initials on their skin,” Eve chuckles under her breath.

“Thirty years and counting,” Elena says with a shrug. “Let’s hope it never happens.”

Elena’s cynicism is a stark contrast to Eve’s own opinion on the marks. She has always thought of them to be quite romantic, though that was before her own appeared so abruptly on her abdomen. Eve used to dream of her mark when she was a young girl, picturing an epic romance with the handsome prince riding in on his white horse to sweep her off her feet. Fate hasn’t quite worked out like that, but even with the threat of the marks attempting to drive a wedge between herself and Niko, she still finds an unparalleled connection to this ‘V’ person, despite not knowing who they are or even anything about them at all.

The receptionist returns at that moment and holds open the door behind her as she addresses them.

“You can come through now,” she says. 

Eve gets to her feet and swings her heavy bag over her shoulder as she makes to follow Elena through the door to the morgue.

Their conversation about soulmates now in the past, Elena turns to look at Eve over her shoulder as they follow the receptionist, and says, “This is exciting. I’ve never seen a dead body before.”

“Exciting for you, maybe,” Eve mutters. “I doubt Paul is particularly happy about the situation.”

“Well he can suck it up.”

The receptionist taps her pass against a security door and holds it open for Eve and Elena, where she leaves them. The room is well-lit but cold, with a trolley covered in a white sheet in the centre of the room and a morgue attendant in protective clothing sitting at a computer against the far wall.

“Hi, I’m Eve Polastri,” Eve greets the morgue attendant. “Is this the body?”

“That’s right,” says the attendant, getting to his feet and crossing over to the body, where he peels back the sheet down to Paul’s waist.

The body looks exactly as Eve thought it would, but she still isn’t prepared for what she sees. The body looks almost as if it has been carved from wax, eyelids closed and frozen in sleep. Paul’s skin is pale and almost greying in its lifelessness, marred by a pair of twin puncture marks over his heart and a large incision across his chest that has been sewn up again.

“Elena,” says Eve, gesturing at the body with a nod of her head.

Beside Eve, Elena stares at the body cautiously, as if she half-expects Paul to suddenly bolt upright and tell them all that it is just a horrible prank. When she realises that Eve has said her name, she snaps out of her trance and reaches into her bag, pulling out a small digital camera which she switches on to take a few photographs of the body to take with them back to the office for the investigation board that Bill is assembling.

“Those are pretty small wounds,” says Eve, eying up the two puncture marks on the left side of Paul’s chest. “The weapon was circular, a sharp rod maybe?”

“Almost,” says the attendant. “A sharpened chopstick. Metal.”

“That’s so cool,” says Eve, unable to keep the wonder out of her voice. When she realises that both Elena and the morgue attendant are regarding her with confused expressions, she quickly elaborates, “I mean, it’s so _unique._ Stabbed in the heart with a chopstick?”

“The first stab pierced the left ventricle, which is responsible for pumping blood to the rest of the body. When the assailant withdrew the weapon, blood would have spurted out through the exit wound. The second stab wound hit the left anterior descending coronary artery.”

“So there was a lot of mess?” asks Eve. “How difficult is it to stab somebody in the heart?”

“The main challenge is missing the ribcage,” explains the attendant. “It’s tricky with a regular blade because you have to angle it sideways to slot between the ribs. A pointed weapon such as a chopstick is small enough to fit through at any angle but the victim had two layers of clothing which once again makes accuracy harder.”

“She’s highly skilled then, just as we thought,” comments Eve thoughtfully. “She was probably trained to kill.”

“And did he die quickly?” interjects Elena, snapping a couple of quick pictures of the wounds.

“When the heart is punctured, every second is critical,” explains the attendant with a nod. “The victim was unresponsive when the ambulance arrived and was pronounced dead on arrival at St Thomas’ Hospital. It all happened within minutes.”

Eve peels the sheet covering the body down further and her eyes fall to a pair of letters on Paul’s hips.

“A soulmate,” she says, gesturing to the mark to bring it to Elena’s attention. “I wonder who it could be.”

“His husband, maybe?” suggests Elena, walking around the body to get a good angle of his mark with the camera.

“Didn’t they get divorced?”

“That doesn’t mean they weren’t soulmates,” Elena says, taking a few more pictures of the mark from up close. 

“It must be so disappointing if the mark doesn’t actually translate to happily ever after,” says Eve, thinking aloud. Her mind wanders to her own soulmate, as of yet nothing more than a shapeless genderless shadow, and ponders if they would have a happily ever after if the circumstances were different and she wasn’t already married to Niko.

“Not many people do get that. Like I said earlier, I think it’s bullshit.”

“We should still find out who his mark stands for,” says Eve, ignoring Elena’s cynicism. “It probably won’t be relevant if he was killed because of his connections in intelligence, but we need to build up a full picture of his life.” As an afterthought, Eve adds, “And maybe we should find out if any of our assassin’s other victims had marks too, just to be thorough. If there is a link, I want to know about it.”

“I’ll get on that when we get back to the office,” says Elena. 

Eve turns to the attendant and asks, “About the post-mortem? We’ve only just been assigned the case and I think it might have got stuck in the inbox of somebody far superior to us. Is there any chance we could get a copy?”

The attendant crosses over to his desk and slides a sheet of paper and a pen across to Eve.

“Write down your email address and I’ll get it sent over to you straight away.”

“Thank you,” says Eve, with a smile. She looks across at Elena and asks, “Is there anything else, do you think?”

Elena takes a few final pictures of the body, then switches the camera off and drops it back into her bag.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Thank you so much,” Eve tells the attendant. “This has been really useful.”

* * *

When Eve returns to the office with Elena, she expects to find a beautifully constructed evidence board. Which is exactly what she does find, but her attention is instead immediately drawn to the extra desk that seems to have materialised in their absence. There is also another person in the office in addition to Bill, a young man in his early-twenties who seems to be in the middle of setting up a desktop computer on the new desk.

“What’s going on?” asks Eve, stopping in the doorway to survey the scene.

“Ladies, this is Kenny,” says Bill, getting to his feet to make the introductions. “He’ll be joining us from now on. Kenny, meet Eve and Elena.”

Kenny puts down the wires that he is trying to connect to the back of a monitor and steps out from behind the desk to greet Eve and Elena each in turn with a handshake. He is young and fresh-faced, dressed on the casual side in a polo shirt with wide stripes and a pair of shorts. 

“Carolyn assigned me to your team because I’m good with computers,” he explains.

“Oh good,” says Eve, returning to her own desk and dropping her bag beneath the table as she shrugs off her coat. “Because the rest of us are all pretty technologically inept.”

“Hey!” complains Elena. “Speak for yourself. I know my way around a computer.”

“I think when Kenny says he’s good with computers, he’s probably talking about hacking into encrypted websites, not using hashtags and pivot tables. Right, Kenny?”

“Uh, yeah,” Kenny answers. “I can hack into most things with the right tools and enough time.”

“Awesome,” says Eve.

“Do you even know what a pivot table is, Eve?” scoffs Elena, taking a seat at her own desk.

“Not a clue,” Eve admits. “But I thought it made me sound clever.”

“I was impressed,” comments Bill, crossing the office so that he can perch on the edge of Eve’s desk, which is closest to the board covered in the research. “Anyway, what did you find out at the morgue?”

“He was stabbed twice through the heart with a metal chopstick and died before they could get him to the hospital,” explains Eve. She admires Bill’s handiwork, impressed with the way that he has managed to take the jumble of notes that had been in Eve’s folder and started to organise it into a semi-coherent summary of the investigation so far. “This looks really good, Bill. Elena, could you start printing out those pictures you took of the body?”

“Already on it,” says Elena, as she plugs the digital camera into her computer.

Something on the evidence board catches Eve’s eye, a piece of paper pinned in the upper right corner of the board. It is a crudely drawn sketch of what Eve can only assume is a woman’s head, based on the fact that it is egg-shaped and seems to have dark shoulder-length hair, but there are no other facial features. 

“What’s this?” Eve asks Bill.

“That is our assassin,” says Bill, getting to his feet and crossing over to the evidence board. “Or at least, that’s what the sketch artist produced based on Carolyn’s description of the waitress.” 

“She doesn’t have a face,” Eve points out, frowning at the image that may as well not be there, for how useless it will be in helping them to identify the assassin.

Bill points his index finger at a small post-it note pinned just beneath the sketch and reads it aloud.

“‘Dark hair, mid-twenties’ is all Carolyn could remember.”

“Are you kidding?” groans Eve, staring at the image and trying to feel something other than overwhelming disappointment. “Carolyn saw the assassin and that’s all she can recall?”

“Do you pay close attention to the waiting staff when you go out to a restaurant?” Bill asks, arching an eyebrow at her.

Eve hates that Bill is always right.

“No,” she reluctantly concedes.

“Anyway, I’ve contacted the restaurant and I’m hoping to speak with some other witnesses - other employees who had shifts at the same time, some of the other customers, and so on. If we can get even a couple of people who can remember her face, then we can start to build a better e-fit.”

“Good. And what about CCTV?”

“None in the restaurant, I’m afraid,” Bill answers with a grimace. “Apparently the system has been down for a couple of months and they haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet. But when Kenny has finished setting up his desk, he’s going to start looking for other CCTV in the area to identify any women who match the suspect’s description near to the restaurant around the time of the murder.”

“Good,” says Eve, dropping into her chair and rolling it closer to the evidence board so she can survey their findings so far. “Really good job with this, Bill. Thanks for staying and sorting it out.” 

“No problem.”

Something else pops back into Eve’s mind from seeing Paul’s body in the morgue, and she is quick to tell Bill.

“Oh, Paul had a mark, by the way. It might not be relevant but we should still find out who it is.”

“I’ll look into it now,” says Bill, returning to his own desk across the office.

“Have you got a soulmate, Kenny?” asks Elena, as she gets up from her chair and crosses over to their small printer in the corner behind Bill’s desk, which is shooting out a selection of photographs taken of Paul’s body at the morgue.

“Uh, no,” answers Kenny. “Not yet.”

“Count yourself lucky. Eve got hers this week and it’s already ruined her life.”

“It has not ruined my life!” protests Eve. 

Her hand instinctively goes to her stomach, touching the mark through her clothes. Even through a layer of cotton, the skin of her abdomen is sensitive to the touch, ticklish where Eve’s fingertips trace the pattern of the ‘V’ that she doesn’t need to look at anymore to know exactly where it is.

“You’ve just spent the whole weekend sleeping on your sofa because you and Niko are both too stubborn to sit down and have a rational conversation with each other about it,” points out Elena, as she returns to her desk with the printed photos and picks up a pair of scissors to cut away the excess paper around the edges.

“We’re just giving each other some space,” Eve attempts to explain. “It’s entirely healthy.”

Giving each other space every now and again might be healthy, but Eve knows that she will find it difficult to justify her stance that hiding something as significant as a mark from Niko, then pointedly ignoring each other all weekend is a healthy way to conduct one’s marriage. She is grateful that Elena doesn’t call her out on it.

What Elena _does_ decide to do, however, is to speculate about the identity of Eve’s soulmate, a topic of conversation which is almost as unwelcome as her current problems at home with Niko.

“Any more thoughts about who it could be?” asks Elena, getting to her feet so that she can pin the first couple of photographs of Paul’s body to the board. 

“Not really,” Eve answers, with an attempt at a nonchalant shrug. “It doesn’t bother me that much that I don’t know.”

It’s an enormous lie, even bigger than the one about the space between herself and Niko being a conscious choice to improve the health of their marriage. Eve’s brain has only thought about two things in the last week, and while one of those is now plastered across a corkboard thanks to Bill’s organisation skills, the other is the identity of her mystery soulmate.

It’s just _so_ unfair that Eve doesn’t know who it is. She has been scouring the deepest corners of her mind in an attempt to recall who she might have met on that day that could be significant enough that Eve has wound up with an impossible to ignore ‘V’ on her abdomen. It makes no sense that somebody could leave such a lasting impression on Eve’s skin, whilst simultaneously leaving Eve with no recollection of who they actually are.

At this point, there are very few things that Eve wouldn’t do, just to learn the identity of her soulmate.

And that’s all it would be. Eve doesn’t need to meet them again, or find out why the universe has designated that they are the person whose letter is on Eve’s skin. She doesn’t need to get to know them, what they like and dislike, what their greatest hopes and deepest fears are, what they do for a living and what they eat for breakfast and what they enjoy doing on the weekend...

No, Eve doesn’t need any of that. She just needs to find out who it is, for her own peace of mind, and then she can put this brief interlude behind her and move on with her life.

Is that really too much to ask?

“Hey, Eve,” says Elena, slumping back in her chair when the pictures of the wounds on Paul’s body have been pinned to the board. “What about that woman you literally walked into when we went out for lunch?”

Eve recalls the encounter with the woman she bumped into in the coffee shop with a watered down version of the embarrassment she felt at the time. She had been mortified when she knocked into the woman, paying more attention to whatever mindless conversation she had been having with Elena than to her surroundings, but then the woman had looked at her with those warm brown eyes and her smile had been so soft and inviting and Eve’s shame had just melted away.

As she thinks of that woman, a thought strikes Eve, as sudden and unexpected as a bolt of lightning striking the roof of a house.

“Oh my god, Elena you are a genius!”

“You think that she might be your soulmate?”

Her soulmate? Eve almost scoffs at the notion, and only doesn’t because that would waste time that Eve doesn’t have because her mind is already moving at a million miles per minute.

“Soulmate? Elena, I think that she might be our _assassin.”_ Eve crosses over to the evidence board and points at the crude sketch of the waitress based on Carolyn’s description, then addresses the rest of the room as she explains, “Dark hair. Mid twenties. And what was she wearing?”

Elena shrugs and shakes her head.

“I don’t remember.”

“A white shirt and black pants.”

“Like a waitress,” interjects Bill, his eyes widening in realisation.

“Holy shit!” exclaims Elena.

“I know!” enthuses Eve, fighting off a smile. “We might have met her.”

“No,” says Elena, shaking her head as her eyebrows furrow into a disbelieving frown. “I said ‘holy shit’ because your soulmate could be our assassin.”

Eve screws her face up in incredulity. Her soulmate cannot be-

Except that if the woman from the coffee shop _is_ their assassin, and Eve happened to bump into her on the same day that the mark appeared, then she has to be a candidate for the mark on Eve’s stomach. 

It’s incredibly unlikely though, Eve tells herself. There must be hundreds of other Londoners who are candidates, commuters on Eve’s bus journey to and from work or people she passed on the street outside the office. The likelihood of it being that particular woman out of all the other possibilities, is incredibly slim.

And if she _is_ the assassin? Could it be that a chance encounter with a serial killer while getting lunch could be the reason for the whopping ‘V’ on her stomach?

That would certainly be a cruel twist of destiny.

But it is destiny that has gotten Eve into this mess, so could it be destiny that gets her out of it too?

Eve doesn’t really want to dwell on the possibility that the assassin could be her soulmate, not when it is still just a possibility. For all Eve knows, that woman might just be that - a _woman_ \- and that is what Eve should focus on for now, trying to identify their assassin without jumping to any conclusions.

It’ll be much better for everybody if Eve continues to consider the assassin and her soulmate as different entities. She needs to identify them both, but for different reasons.

“Kenny, when you’ve finished setting up your desk, do you think you could try to pull CCTV from around the Little Bean Cafe last Tuesday lunchtime?” Eve asks Kenny.

“I can try,” he replies, with an eager-to-please nod.

“Great.”

“Hold up, Eve,” interjects Elena, arching an eyebrow and battling a smirk. “Are you using MI6 resources to trace the hottie you think might be your soulmate?”

“Assassin, Elena,” Eve counters. “I’m using MI6 resources to trace the hottie I think might be my assassin.”

“ _Your_ assassin,” laughs Bill, exchanging a knowing look with Elena.

“ _Our_ assassin,” Eve quickly corrects herself, feeling her cheeks start to burn with blistering embarrassment. “Our assassin. The one we’re hunting. She’s not mine.”

“Not yet,” grins Elena. 

There’s a moment of silence that hangs between the four of them, allowing Eve to fester in her own embarrassment, before Bill finally breaks it by teasing, “A real hottie, huh?”

“Shut up,” grumbles Eve, switching on her computer with complete determination to do her job and do it well.

Eve really hates her colleagues sometimes.


	6. not contagious

When Eve arrives at the office early the following morning, it is only partly due to the fact that she raced to get out of the house to avoid a confrontation with Niko over breakfast. Mostly, it is because she hasn’t been this excited about work in … well,  _ ever, _ to be honest.

Eve still cannot quite believe that they are doing this, that they have been given the task of tracking a prolific and elusive female assassin. Eve feels as though her entire life has been building to this moment, years spent studying and researching specifically for this exact scenario. 

And sure, they haven’t had a breakthrough yet. But as Eve pauses to admire the wealth of information covering every inch of the large cork board that stands between her own and Elena’s desks, she is optimistic that their breakthrough will come soon. They now have four deaths to attribute to this one woman, and with Eve’s suspicion that she may even have already met their suspect during that brief encounter in the coffee shop, it won’t be long before they have enough information to figure out who she is.

But unfortunately, just when Eve is about to get to work, Elena’s sourfaced arrival puts it all to an abrupt halt.

“Oi, Eve!” says Elena, blustering across the room and depositing her coat and bag beside her desk. “I’m blaming you for this.”

“Blaming me for what?”

Eve doesn’t have to wait long to find out, because Elena approaches her almost immediately, shrugging off her charcoal coloured blazer and pushing up the sleeve of the top she wears beneath it to brandish her left arm at Eve. She isn’t quite sure what she is looking for at first because it is so small, but then Eve notices the letters ‘KS’ in a neat font printed in the middle of her bicep.

It takes a few seconds for it to click, but when it does, Eve’s eyebrows rocket upwards across her face.

“Wait, Kenny?”

“Who else?” Elena answers with a shrug, before adding dramatically, “My entire life is ruined now.”

“Kenny seems nice,” Eve attempts to reason. Something registers in her mind from when Elena first arrived, and she scowls at Elena, affronted as she asks, “Hang on, you said you’re blaming  _ me?” _

“Oh, absolutely,” Elena nods. “I’ve been happily mark-less for thirty years and then within a week of you getting yours, I get one too.”

“They’re not contagious!” protests Eve. “And if they are then Niko is to blame.”

Elena looks down at her arm, rubbing the pad of her thumb over the mark as if expecting it to just wipe away, then lets out a groan when it doesn’t.

“This has cocked everything up,” Elena complains. “I think I now understand why you were in a weird mood all last week.”

“Hey, look at the bright side,” says Eve. “At least you know Kenny.”

Eve’s head jerks up at the sound of hurried footsteps across the wooden floor and she almost topples off her chair in surprise as she realises that Kenny has just arrived. Kenny stalls in his place as he notices the two women, his eyes flitting from Eve’s wide-eyed expression to Elena, who still has her left sleeve rolled up to her shoulder to expose the mark, before he seems to realise that he has interrupted something and turns on his heel to leave almost as abruptly as he arrived in the first place.

“Oh god,” groans Elena, rolling down her sleeve and dropping into her own chair, where she rests her elbows on her desk and holds her head in both hands in embarrassment. “I think that was the worst moment of my entire life. I want to die.”

“Come on, it wasn’t that bad,” Eve attempts to reassure her. “What do you think of Kenny, anyway?”

“I think I would eat him alive,” Elena answers, lifting her head out of her hands so that she can look at Rve. “Not that I would mind. I’ve always had a bit of a thing for younger men. My sister says it’s why I’m still single. She says I need to date guys my own age who are ready to settle down.”

“I think Kenny seems nice,” Eve says with a shrug. Though she has only known Kenny for a day, her first impression of him is a good one. “I think you could do far worse.”

“You know I think these marks are stupid anyway,” comes Elena’s reply. “I’m not going to get hung up on a bloke because his initials are on my arm. Especially not somebody I work with. I don’t want to make it weird for the rest of you.”

Eve pauses for a few seconds, then laughs under her breath as she says, “I bet you sleep with him within a month.”

“Stop it!” groans Elena. She grins at Eve and adds, “You know I don’t need the encouragement.”

“Do I dare ask what you two have done to poor Kenny?” asks Bill, entering the office with his bag slung over his shoulder and a steaming mug of tea in one hand. “I just bumped into him in the kitchen and he could hardly look me in the eye.”

“Nothing!” Eve and Elena day in unison, exchanging a glance with each other.

Bill regards them both with suspicion, before taking a seat at his desk. 

“Don’t scare him away,” Bill pleads with them. “He seems pretty competent and we need all the help we can get to find this assassin.”

“We wouldn’t dream of it,” Eve promises him, though she cannot be one hundred percent sure that Elena won’t accidentally end up saying something that scars Kenny for life. 

“Can we ask you something, Bill?” asks Elena.

“That depends what it is,” Bill answers, his eyes lit up with amusement as he waits for Elena’s question.

“What’s it like having sex with your soulmate? Is it different to having sex with any other person?”

“Why do you want to know?” asks Bill, narrowing his eyes as he glances between Elena and Eve.

“Oh, Eve was curious, that’s all.”

Eve’s mouth falls open in outrage.

“I was not-”

Eve cuts herself off mid-sentence, realising that the implication of Elena’s question to Bill means that she is considering her own mark and the hypothetical relationship with Kenny with more interest than she initially let on. Bill watches Eve, waiting for her to finish her protest, but she closes her mouth and sinks back in her chair, deciding to let Elena take this victory.

“I think it depends on the person,” Bill eventually answers Elena’s question. His smile slowly twists into a wicked grin and he finishes by adding, “But sometimes it’s bloody  _ amazing!” _

* * *

Because Eve has still not had an adult conversation with Niko about her mark and leaving the office at five thirty with everybody else will either mean another evening of pretending not to acknowledge Niko’s presence or finally having to concede that she is in the wrong by apologising to him, Eve instead chooses the third option which is to stay late that night to continue working on the case. She orders Deliveroo to the security gate downstairs, collecting a paper bag of food from a young man who looks a little bit stunned that he has been asked to deliver pad thai to the headquarters of MI6, then makes her way back up through the deserted corridors to the empty office.

Or rather, to what she expects to be an empty office.

“Kenny?” Eve asks, when she steps back into the office and finds Kenny still sitting at his computer.

“Oh, hi Eve,” he says, looking up from his screen to shoot her a friendly smile. “Sorry, I didn’t realise you were still here too.”

“You know that you don’t have to stay late just to prove your commitment to the job?” Eve asks him, returning to her own desk and delving inside the paper bag to lift the plastic food containers. “We’re not that kind of team.”

“That’s not why I’m staying late,” Kenny answers with a shrug. “I like it here. It’s just me and my mum at home and she can be … well, she can be quite a lot to deal with sometimes.”

“Strict mom, huh?”

“Not really. She can just be pretty intense sometimes.”

“Oh, I feel you there.”

Eve peels the lid off her takeaway container and inhales deeply, relaxing as all her troubles at home seem to disintegrate when the scent of Thai food hits her nostrils. She stirs the food for a couple of seconds, then takes a mouthful, humming in satisfaction at the warm flavours.

“Sorry, Kenny,” Eve says, when she has swallowed the first mouthful of food. “If I’d known you were staying too, I would have asked what you wanted.”

“Don’t worry about it,” replies Kenny. “I’ll get a kebab or something on my way home later.”

Silence falls between them, punctuated only by the occasional click of a mouse or tap of computer keys. Eve is only half-heartedly working, paying more attention to the container of food than to the eyewitness statements from staff and other customers at the restaurant. There’s not much information that they don’t already have anyway, just more reports of a dark-haired young woman from a hospitality agency who came to work her first shift, though not even the restaurant manager seems to be able to confirm which agency the assassin was supposedly hired from.

“So why are you staying late?” Kenny eventually asks, his voice cutting through the silence. “Won’t your husband be wondering where you are?”

“Niko,” says Eve, pausing to consider whether Niko even gives a shit that this is the second night in a row that Eve has chosen to stay late instead of going home to talk to him. “He’s, uh… we’re kind of fighting at the moment. Well, we would be if we were talking to each other. We both got our marks this last week and it’s quite a lot to get our heads around.”

“Yeah, I can imagine.”

Eve glances up at Kenny and notices that his cheeks are slightly pink-tinged, and she remembers the mark that Elena showed her earlier. Kenny had been flustered when he interrupted Elena showing off her mark, which Eve took as a confirmation that he knew exactly what was going on.

“So, um, what you walked in on earlier with Elena…”

“Don’t worry about it,” says Kenny, dismissing it quickly.

“Did you see…?”

“Not really,” answers Kenny. He pauses, then looks up from his computer and shrugs sheepishly as he explains, “but I kind of guessed.”

“You’ve got one too?” asks Eve.

Kenny nods silently.

“You know, they don’t actually have to mean anything.”

“I know.” Kenny pauses, then adds, “I have a girlfriend.”

“Oh.”

Eve wonders how Elena will react to that piece of information, whether she will stay as unbothered by Kenny and her mark as she claims to be.

What if  _ Eve’s _ soulmate is already in a relationship? What if they’re already happy in an Eve-less existence with somebody else?

Not that it should matter, Eve carefully reminds herself as Niko’s scowling face swims to the front of her mind and drowns her in guilt. Eve is happily married and there is no reason for her to get jealous of the hypothetical relationship of somebody she doesn’t know.

“I was thinking about breaking up with her,” says Kenny, his voice a welcome interruption to Eve’s thoughts. “Not because of the…” Kenny trails off and gestures vaguely at his bicep, where Eve presumes the letters ‘EF’ lie concealed beneath his jacket. “We don’t have much in common so I was already thinking of ending it before I met Elena. But now I don’t want Audrey to think that the only reason I’m breaking up with her is because of the mark.”

“Your girlfriend knows about the mark?” Eve asks.

“Yeah, I told her straight away.” Kenny pauses, then tilts his head to the side inquisitively as he asks Eve, “Do you think I shouldn’t’ve?”

Eve thinks of Niko, who she hasn’t been in the same room as for barely longer than five minutes at a time since their argument last Friday when he found the mark. Would his reaction have been different if she had shown him voluntarily? Would she even be sitting here with Kenny right now instead of being at home with Niko, if she had told him about the mark as soon as she found it? 

“No,” answers Eve, shaking her head from side to side defiantly. “Believe me, hiding them does no good. How did she react?”

“She was fine with it,” Kenny answers with a shrug. “I don’t entirely believe in them anyway.” His eyes widen suddenly and he quickly follows up by adding, “Not that I’ve got anything against Elena, it’s just love is something that grows, isn’t it? It doesn’t just happen instantly because of fate, or whatever.”

Eve has spent her entire life dreaming of fate, of an epic romance that begins with a love-at-first-sight encounter, just like in all the rom-coms. Fate has a pretty twisted idea of what will make Eve happy, if the last week is anything to go by. Having experienced fate in this way, rather than the blooming fairytale she always hoped for, Eve wishes that she could also share either Elena’s cynicism or Kenny’s more realistic reliance on creating your own destiny.

“No, it doesn’t,” concedes Eve.

“So,” Kenny says hesitantly, before he asks, “you got yours last week?”

“That’s right.” 

“It must suck to not know who it is.” 

“It does suck,” admits Eve. “I mean, I love Niko. I’m happy with Niko. But I don’t want him to think I’m settling for him because I don’t know who my soulmate is. I want the chance to choose him over this ‘V’ person.”

“Elena reckons it might be our assassin.”

Eve’s eyes wander to the evidence board, where the faceless e-fit watches over them like an eerie shadow from a horror movie.

“I don’t know,” Eve says. “What does that say about me if my soulmate is a murderous psychopath? And we don’t even know if the woman I bumped into even is the assassin.”

Kenny’s eyes brighten and he says, “Oh, by the way, I managed to get hold of CCTV from the bookies opposite the coffee shop you went to on the day that Paul died.”

“You did?” asks Eve, excitement creeping into her voice. “What did you find?”

“Nothing yet. Do you want to look through it together? You’ll probably recognise her before I do.”

Grateful to have a distraction from conversations about her soulmate, Eve picks up the half-eaten plastic container of Thai food and rolls her chair across the office to Kenny’s desk. Open on his computer screen is a grainy black and white image of a busy street from two different angles, one shot from a camera inside the shop and another mounted on the wall outside. Neither has a perfect view of the coffee shop opposite and the sidewalks are crowded with Londoners going out during their lunch breaks, but Eve is optimistic that they’ll be able to get a shot of the woman from this.

Kenny presses play and Eve sits back in her chair, continuing to eat her food as she watches, as if this is a movie rather than crucial CCTV footage that could be their first big lead in this case.

“Do you know what time you got to the coffee shop?”

Swallowing her mouthful of food, Eve answers, “Elena and I took our lunch break at twelve so just after that. And the manager at the restaurant said that the waitress who killed Paul started her shift at twelve thirty.”

“So if this is our woman, we’ve got a maximum of thirty minutes in which we might spot her,” says Kenny, fast-forwarding through the footage until the digital time display in the bottom corner reaches midday.

Watching it slightly sped-up from real time, it only takes a few minutes before something catches Eve’s eye.

“Wait!”

Kenny reaches out and pauses the footage at Eve’s exclamation.

“Do you see her?”

“Go back a few seconds,” Eve instructs him.

Kenny obeys; rewinding the recording until Eve tells him to stop.

“There!” says Eve, pointing at two blurry, yet recognisable figures on the screen. “That’s me and Elena. And we’re walking from the direction of the office so that must be us arriving. Go back a bit more and I’ll see if I can spot the woman who was in front of us.”

Kenny rolls the footage backwards and forward a few times while Eve squints at the screen, desperately scanning the other pedestrians for a familiar-looking brunette.

“I can’t see her,” says Eve, shaking her head in disappointment but refusing to give up just yet. “She must have come from the wrong direction. The angle of the cameras might be better to catch her leaving. Let’s try fast-forwarding a few minutes to see if we can spot her leaving the coffee shop instead.”

They watch through the footage, with Eve carefully scanning the pedestrians outside the coffee shop for a familiar figure, until something jumps out at her.

“There! That’s her!”

Eve points to a person on the screen, a woman with dark hair walking away from the door to the coffee shop.

“Are you sure?” asks Kenny.

He zooms in on the woman, which doesn’t help much because the poor quality of the camera means that it is still just a fuzzy face, but on a slightly larger scale. But there is absolutely no doubt in Eve’s mind that this is the right woman. Eve would recognise her anywhere, face blurred or not. The hair is the same and she is wearing a white shirt and black pants that Eve remembers seeing her in. But most crucially, Eve can recall the woman’s face as clearly as if she were standing in this very room right now and knows that she can project it onto the blurry contours of this image with complete certainty.

“Absolutely.”

Kenny scrolls through the next few seconds of footage slowly, following the woman along the sidewalk until she disappears out of view of both cameras.

“Well that could be a start,” he says, turning to look at Eve with raised eyebrows. “I’ll look for other cameras in the area and see if we can trace her to the restaurant.”

“And I’ll get a new e-fit drawn up first thing tomorrow morning from what I remember of her face. If we can show it to the staff at the restaurant, they might be able to confirm if it was her.” Eve shoots Kenny a smile and adds, “Good work, Kenny. She’s not as untouchable as she thinks she is.”

* * *

It is more than an hour later that Eve slots a key into the lock of her front door, but with a renewed sense of optimism regarding the assassin, Eve thinks that she might be finally ready to deal with Niko. She finds him sitting at the dining table, methodically working through a stack of exercise books with a green pen, an almost empty bottle of beer in his free hand.

“Are you supposed to drink while you mark?” Eve asks, as a means of breaking the tension.

“Bottom set Year Nine,” he explains, taking a swig from the bottle before he places it down on the table. “It’s the only way to get through it.”

“Of course,” Eve says, in an attempt at being sympathetic to his troubles.

Niko scribbles something in the open book in front of him, then lets out an exasperated sigh.

“Jesus, how can you get to fourteen years old without learning the four times table?”

“Niko, can we talk?”

Niko writes down one final thing, then closes the exercise book and sets down his pen.

“Sure.”

With Niko’s eyes on her, Eve suddenly forgets everything that she wants to say. She used the bus journey home from work to plan out an entire speech, rehearsing and rewriting it in her head until it was perfect, but now that she has the spotlight shining upon her, Eve’s mind may as well just be full of dust.

Which is why instead of delivering a rehearsed speech, Eve just lets out the sigh of a woman who is exhausted from several restless nights on the couch and instead says, “Listen, Niko, can we just put all this behind us? We’ve both got marks now, but neither of them mean anything and…”

Eve trails off, knowing that Niko is waiting for her to give an apology. There is a stubborn part of her that doesn’t want to admit that she was wrong, but Eve knows that she can’t keep sleeping on the couch forever. She also knows that every day she keeps her distance from Niko is another day that he has to get to know Gemma at work, and Eve selfishly doesn’t want to give him the chance to start considering Gemma as an alternative option to his wife.

“I’m sorry, okay?” Eve finally conceded. “I should have told you about it as soon as I found it. But I panicked and that made things worse and I understand that now. Believe me, if I could go back and change things then I would.”

“Why did you do it, Eve?” Niko asks, frowning at Eve. “Why did you hide it from me?”

“I guess I was scared,” admits Eve.

“Of me?” asks Niko, his eyebrows shooting upwards.

“Of the unknown. And I don’t want you to think that I’m only choosing you because I don’t have the chance to choose this other person. You’re my first choice, Niko. You always have been and this doesn’t change that.”

“I know,” replies Niko. He holds up his left hand and gestures to the gold band on his ring finger, slightly tarnished from years of wear, then adds, “This doesn’t just go away the second that a mark appears. I’m fully committed to you, Eve, but I need to know that you’re committed to me too.”

Eve is quick to insist, “I am.”

“No more lies, then,” says Niko. “No more secrets. That goes both ways. We both have to be one hundred percent honest with each other. I don’t think we can pretend that this is an easy situation, but if we support each other…”

“Oh, absolutely,” agrees Eve.

She thinks of Gemma, who she still knows nothing about other than the fact that Niko has her initials on his shoulder, and wonders if Niko has spent any time with her since he found his mark. Eve isn’t sure how she feels about the idea of Niko getting to know Gemma, because on one hand it would give her some validation to know that Niko has chosen her over the person who is supposedly his soulmate, but Eve also doesn’t like to think of Niko entertaining the idea of being with somebody other than her.

“In the interest of honesty,” Eve tentatively starts, wondering how she can phrase this so that it doesn’t paint her as the prying wife who doesn’t trust him. “Am I allowed to ask about Gemma?”

“Sure, what about her?”

“Have you spent much time with her?” Eve dares to ask.

“Not really,” Niko answers, giving a little shrug. “We’ve spoken a few times because it would be rude to ignore her completely, but it’s just friendly. It’s nothing more than that.”

“Good.”

“And you really don’t know who yours is?” Niko asks.

“No,” says Eve. “Probably just some stranger who smiled at me on the bus.”

She thinks of the woman from the coffee shop and Elena’s suggestion that  _ she _ could be the mysterious ‘V’, as well as their possible assassin.

“Never mind, it doesn’t matter anyway,” says Niko, with a reassuring smile. He swiftly changes the subject by asking, “How has work been? Are you still investigating that murderer?”

“The assassin? Yeah, we’re still looking for her. I think we’re on the verge of making a big breakthrough.”

Eve smiles to herself as she says this, because she can hardly contain her excitement at the prospect of having a confirmed suspect. The fact that she may have met the assassin is thrilling in more ways than Eve can describe. She has spent years of her life researching female psychopaths, but the fact that she is not only tasked with hunting one, but may have even met one randomly while going about her normal routine, has every inch of Eve’s body thrumming with exhilaration.

It’s not too dissimilar to feeling turned on.

In fact...

“Do you want to come upstairs?” Eve asks, shooting Niko a coy smile.

“But I’ve got to…” starts Niko, gesturing to the remaining books, before cutting himself off mid-sentence. He regards Eve with a curious look, then asks, “But it’s Tuesday.”

Eve struggles not to roll her eyes, because sex is not something that is exclusively possible at the weekend. But because she is trying to get back into Niko’s good books, she instead shoots him a suggestive smile and sashays her hips from side to side as she takes a couple of steps back towards the stairs.

“I can always just take care of myself,” she teases, wrapping a hand around one of the lower bannisters as she climbs onto the first step, still fluttering her eyelashes at Niko through the doorway between the kitchen and the hall.

Eve climbs a few more stairs until Niko is out of view, waiting for him to follow her, and when she hears the scraping of the chair against the floor followed by his footsteps across the room, she knows that she has got him.

Niko chases her up to the bedroom, his footsteps thundering up the stairs behind her. It’s the first time that Eve has been in there since Friday apart for a couple of minutes each morning to pick a new outfit from the closet while Niko showers, and she takes a moment to breathe a sigh of relief that she won’t have to endure another night of sleeping on a couch that is slightly too short to fit her entire body lengthways.

They have sex on the bed and it’s nothing special but Eve pretends that she’s having a good time anyway, because that’s just how marriage works. They do it in the missionary position because that’s Niko’s favourite - he says that it’s because he likes to be able to kiss Eve while they’re doing it, but sometimes a girl just wants to be pressed into the mattress and thoroughly  _ fucked.  _

Eve lets him use her body to get off, moaning at the appropriate moments and murmuring words of encouragement to him, which all seems to be working, judging by the way that he grunts with each meagre thrust. And then, when she can tell that he’s almost done, she sends a hand down her own stomach, skating over the large ‘V’ that Niko is pretending isn’t there on herway down, and rubs furiously at her own clit to bring herself to her own peak.

When the climax hits, Eve squeezes her eyes shut and the face that she sees on the inside of her eyelids has the smiling hazel eyes and delicate features of their suspected assassin.


	7. the universe is being naughty

Villanelle has developed a sort of sixth sense for being able to tell when Konstantin is about to show up unannounced at her apartment in Paris. Maybe he is becoming too predictable, or perhaps Villanelle’s awareness of an incoming nuisance is better than it used to be, but she wakes up this morning knowing that she will hear the unwelcome click of her front door opening in just a matter of minutes.

The other side of Villanelle’s bed is disappointingly empty. That has its perks, of course, the main one being that Villanelle has just had an excellent night of undisturbed sleep in the starfish position. But she does get a little kick out of seeing Konstantin’s face every time that he shows up and finds that Villanelle has naked company. Her conquests are numerous and forgettable, but she likes showing off to Konstantin that she can get laid whenever she likes, while he is probably only permitted to have boring missionary sex with his wife once a month.

Villanelle can sense that Konstantin’s arrival is imminent, which is why she prepares accordingly. She slips out of bed and grabs a silk robe from the back of a chair, sliding her arms into the sleeves and carefully arranging it to show off a little too much cleavage to be appropriate. Then she grabs a book from the shelf in the living room, a rare first edition of a French novella, and drapes herself lengthways along the couch, the epitome of casual with bare legs extending out from beneath the hem of the robe and her unbrushed hair cascading in messy yet artful curls over her shoulders.

Predictably, the lock on the door clicks open only seconds later, and Villanelle hears Konstantin’s familiar lumbering footsteps get gradually louder as he walks down the hallway.

“Villanelle,” he greets her in a gruff voice, stopping in the doorway to the open plan living area.

“Konstantin,” says Villanelle, feigning surprise. “What a surprise. You should have called to say that you were coming over.”

Konstantin steps into the room and opens Villanelle’s fridge, plucking a carton of orange juice from the inside of the door and then wandering over to the kitchen units to locate a glass.

“Your book is upside down,” he points out, as he fills the glass with juice and then returns the carton to the fridge.

Villanelle looks down at the open pages and scowls when she realises that Konstantin is right.

“How was Kiev?” asks Konstantin, sipping on his glass of juice as he wanders over to the nearby window and peers down at the Parisian street below.

“Surprisingly warm for September,” says Villanelle, tossing the book haphazardly onto the nearby coffee table and shifting into a more comfortable position, tucking one leg beneath her body while the other hangs off the edge of the couch.

“They are happy with your work,” says Konstantin. “So happy, in fact, that they want you to do another one next week.”

There is no suggestion of who ‘they’ are - there never is and Villanelle has long since learned to stop asking, though she can’t help but be a little bit curious as to exactly who gives her each order to kill.

“Again?” asks Villanelle, letting out a disgruntled huff. “They are working me very hard at the moment. You know, it is very unhealthy to have a poor work-life balance. I think I would like some vacation days after this job.”

“Villanelle,” Konstantin warns her.

“What?” Villanelle shrugs, pretending not to see the way that he frowns at her in concern. “Am I not allowed a break? Or do I have to log an official request with HR?”

Konstantin pauses, his eyes narrowed, and Villanelle presses on.

“Who knows what I could do if you work me too hard?” she speculates dramatically. “My mental health could spiral downwards and I might, hmm, accidentally end up on a train back to London.”

She gives him a pointed look, taking pleasure from the way that his jaw clenches perceptibly and his fingers turn paler as he grips the glass. They both know what Villanelle wants from London, and she also knows that Konstantin will do whatever he can to stop her from going there when he has strictly told her not to.

“I will see about you getting a break after this assignment,” concedes Konstantin, though he still regards Villanelle with a careful stare. “But you will not go to London. I am forbidding it. MI6 have set up a team to look for you, led by a woman called Eve Polastri.”

Villanelle’s head jerks upwards at this.

“Wait, Eve Polastri?”

“Yes - I am told she is very persistent and she has an entire team at her disposal. They are even looking beyond the kill in the restaur-”

“You are absolutely sure that her name is Eve Polastri?” asks Villanelle, having lost all interest in anything else that Konstantin might have to say the second that he gave her the name of the MI6 agent.

Villanelle’s hand drops to her stomach, tracing the letters etched onto her skin through the thin silk of her robe.

“I think so. Why does it matt-?” Konstantin cuts himself off mid-sentence, his eyes dropping to where Villanelle’s hand rests over her mark. “No. Villanelle? Tell me that I am wrong.”

It cannot be a coincidence that the letters on Villanelle’s abdomen correspond to the initials of the woman whose job it is to hunt her down. The hunter and the hunted. The cat and the mouse. How fitting, how poetic, that the person Villanelle is looking for also happens to be trying to find her too. 

“She is looking for me, Konstantin,” Villanelle exhales softly, smiling in wonder.

God, she still hopes that it’s the woman with the great hair. She was, after all, in the vicinity of MI6 on the day that her mark appeared.

“Villanelle, you cannot do anything stupid,” Konstantin urges her, concern written on his weary face. “I should never have told you her name.”

“It’s destiny, Konstantin. We are supposed to find each other.”

“No,” says Konstantin, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “You are supposed to behave yourself.”

“I didn’t choose this,” Villanelle complains, getting to her feet and marching over to Konstantin so that she can stare him directly in the eyes. “This isn’t me being naughty, this is the universe is being naughty.”

“Leave Eve Polastri alone,” Konstantin warms her, jabbing an accusatory finger into her chest. “You do not know if she has your mark too.”

Villanelle relaxes and smiles to herself at the thought of somebody bearing her mark. She pictures the woman from the coffee shop, because she has no other point of reference, and tries to imagine her olive skin blemished with Villanelle’s mark. Would it be Villanelle’s actual initials or just the single letter ‘V’? Is it in the same place as Villanelle’s, on the soft skin of her stomach, or is it somewhere else where she can’t hide it beneath layers of clothes? Villanelle cannot deny that she likes the idea of Eve being unable to cover up the mark, of strangers seeing her and knowing straight away that she belongs to Villanelle. But there is a much more intimate appeal to Eve’s mark being somewhere private and Villanelle feels a not entirely unwelcome hum of arousal settle in the pit of her core at the thought of peeling off Eve’s clothes like a present that is being unwrapped and pressing her lips to the mark as her fingers dips lower and…

And yeah, Konstantin needs to be gone already.

“Are you done?” she asks him irritably, pressing her bare legs together beneath the silk robe to alleviate the ache. “I have things to do today.”

“You will not go to London,” he orders her, draining the last of his orange juice. “Promise me. You will go to Germany for this job and you will behave.”

“Why don’t  _ you _ behave?” Villanelle retorts childishly. “Stop letting yourself into my apartment, for starters. You wouldn’t like it if I showed up at your house without an invitation, would you?”

She raises her eyebrows at him and knows that she is correct from the tension in his jaw and the hard line of his mouth.

Konstantin reaches into the inside pocket of his coat and draws out a postcard, which he passes across to Villanelle.

“München?” Villanelle says, as she examines the glossy picture of the Munich  _ Rathaus _ . “My Bavarian accent isn’t very good.”

“Then this is a chance to practice,” says Konstantin. “Stay there a week. See the sights and practice your accent. You did say that you wanted a holiday.”

Villanelle is not too stupid to realise that Konstantin is trying to encourage her to stay away from London and Eve Polastri.

But that’s fine. Perhaps Villanelle will take a holiday in Munich after all. And while Konstantin has strictly forbidden her from going to London, he has said nothing about luring Eve Polastri away from it.

“I will be on my best behaviour,” Villanelle promises him, a plan already starting to formulate in her mind.

* * *

“Kiev. Two days ago.”

Eve takes the article straight from the printer and presses it flat against the evidence board with the palm of her hand, pinning it into place at each of the top corners.

“His name was Artem Kravchenko,” she explains to the group, six pairs of eyes watching her attentively from their respective desks. “Sixty-eight years old and the owner of a Ukrainian oil company. He was in hospital following a heart operation and, according to his medical records before his death, was recovering well until he was found strangled by an IV line. It’s believed that his son ordered the hit, as he was in some serious financial trouble and stood to inherit millions upon his father’s death, but it’s come to our attention because it is thought to be a female nurse in the hospital who actually carried out the order.”

“So it was our girl?” asks Bill, nodding at the e-fit pinned in the upper corner of their research board.

It’s been a steady first week and a half of tracing this assassin, but Eve thinks that the second e-fit, this one drawn from Eve’s memory of the woman she bumped into in the coffee shop on the day of Paul’s death, is perhaps their biggest success. With a sketch of the suspected assassin in their possession, they have been able to send a copy to the restaurant, where three different members of staff there were able to confirm that they recognised the woman as the waitress who killed Paul. That is pretty much their only breakthrough on this case, but with an image of the assassin’s face on their board, she is no longer the completely anonymous entity that she once was.

And now with this new murder to attribute to the assassin, Eve is confident that their progress with the case will start to snowball again until they can build up a more rounded picture of the woman they are looking for.

“It would appear so,” Eve answers Bill’s question. “We should send across a copy of the e-fit to the hospital, just in case somebody is able to make a positive identification to confirm it was her.”

“I’ll do that,” Elena volunteers. “They’ll speak English, won’t they?”

“Let’s hope so. I don’t think any of us speak Ukrainian.”

“Do we know if there are any links between this victim and the others?” asks Bill. “Any reason why the same woman may have killed them all?”

Eve glances at their board, where there are now a total of five bodies all suspected to belong to the same female assassin. She wonders if there are any others who should also be on the board, undiscovered victims who may hold the key to solving this entire mystery. 

“That’s what we need to find out,” Eve tells them all. “That’s our next task.”

“We could start with the son,” pipes up Kenny. “You said that he ordered his father’s murder.”

“Excellent idea, Kenny,” Eve praises him. “We need bank statements, emails, phone records. We follow up every possible lead until we find a connection to one of the other victims. I refuse to believe that a killer this skilled is working freelance. There has to be an organisation behind this and we need to know who they are.”

“A nurse?” Bill muses, frowning at the evidence board. “She likes to play dress up, doesn’t she?”

Eve hums with agreement, scanning the board for the assassin’s repertoire of characters.

“Two weeks ago she was a waitress, this week she’s a nurse,” says Eve. “In one of the other kills she disguised herself as an exotic dancer. She likes to get into character and make a show of it. These aren’t just kills to her, these are performances. And I’m the audience.”

“You specifically?” asks Bill, arching an eyebrow.

“Us. Whatever. She wants somebody to see what she’s doing and acknowledge it.”

“You?”

Eve doesn’t like the look in Bill’s eyes, as if they are sharing a huge secret between them, so she turns to face the other way so that she can pretend it isn’t there.

“Maybe,” she answers. “Or anybody. I just wish we knew who she is. She’s such a fascinating person and I want to know everything about her.”

“I bet you do,” says Elena, exchanging an amused glance with Bill.

“Don’t you?” asks Eve.

“Yes, but only  _ professionally,” _ answers Elena. “But you talk about her like you want to take her out for dinner and propose to her.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” scoffs Eve, rolling her eyes for show, before she glances up at the e-fit again.

The sketch is more of a resemblance than an actual drawing of her, the features similar enough that it can be reliable enough to send to potential witnesses for identification purposes, but it doesn’t really do justice to Eve’s memory of the woman. Eve has no doubt that if she had any artistic skill of her own, she could draw a version so accurate that it could be a photograph. But Eve has neither the patience nor the drawing ability to do such a thing, which is why she has to settle for a picture that looks similar, if Eve stands on the other side of the office and squints.

And for now, it remains the only link they have to her identity. No name, no personal information, no suggestion as to how or why she became a contract killer. Just a sketch pinned to their evidence board and Eve’s memory of a ten-second encounter.

Eve wonders to herself what the assassin ordered from the coffee shop. If she had known she was standing behind such a prolific killer, Eve would perhaps have paid more attention to her. 

“I’m just saying,” says Elena, with a shrug. “I’m still convinced that she’s your ‘V’ person.”

Could it be true? Eve cannot deny that her mind has been becoming increasingly occupied with thoughts of the assassin. It has been two weeks since the mark appeared and now that she and Niko have resolved their differences, Eve thinks that she could perhaps get on board with the idea of this assassin being her soulmate. Not in a romantic context,  _ obviously, _ but Eve rather likes the idea that the universe is telling her that she is supposed to be the one to catch this assassin and bring her down for good.

It could be her big moment. Years of dedicated work as an insignificant cog in the machine of MI6 building to this, to the glory of identifying and bringing down an elusive assassin, to disrupting the work of a global crime organisation, to being the hero rather than the lowly paper-pusher.

But Eve cannot get ahead of herself yet.

Nor can she allow herself and the rest of the team to get distracted by Elena’s soulmate theory.

“There’s no point in speculating about that,” Eve says to Elena, contradicting her brain, which has been doing very little  _ apart  _ from speculating about the identity of her soulmate since the mark appeared. “We need information and this new murder must have something that we can use. Let’s get something solid on her before she strikes again.”

* * *

The gallery is almost empty. So empty, in fact, that the click of Villanelle’s brogues against the wooden floor echoes around the high ceilings with each step that she takes.

An empty gallery is good. Less chance of a witness to what she is about to do. With it nearly being time for the gallery to close for the night, there are hardly any visitors left, and Villanelle knows from a quick peek at the staff roster earlier that there’s only one other employee supposed to be patrolling this part of the gallery and he will currently be glued to a toilet somewhere, thanks to a little something that Villanelle slipped into his drink earlier.

Villanelle spots her target in a neighbouring hall through an archway. He is alone, much to Villanelle’s relief, and she sends a hand around behind her own back to check that the silenced pistol is still tucked into the waistband of her slacks, the hem of her shirt hanging down to cover its handle.

This is far from being the most exciting character that Villanelle has played. Her all black ensemble, along with the name badge pinned to her chest reading ‘Monika’, is all part of her ruse to blend in with the other gallery staff. Nor is a silent gunshot to the head her first choice of killing methods - it doesn’t even make the top ten. But it is quick and efficient and most importantly, it allows her to dispose of the target undetected, buying her the time to stage the scene after his death.

This is not an extravagant kill, this is a test. And if Eve Polastri passes it, then Villanelle will know for sure that the mark on her stomach is the real deal.

It’s time to find out.

“Excuse me, sir?” says Villanelle, addressing the target in German as she approaches him with a polite smile. “I just want to let you know that we’ll be closing in ten minutes.”

The man turns and leers at her slightly, his eyes roving down her body, because apparently men are disgusting pigs even when presented with a woman dressed in a frumpy black uniform.

“Of course,” he replies. “I will start moving towards the exit.”

“Thank you,” says Villanelle, with a sickly smile. She pretends to notice something behind him and lets her eyes widen as she points. “Oh, sir? Does that belong to you?”

He turns, confused, looking for what she is pointing at. With his attention elsewhere, Villanelle sends a hand behind her own back and lets her fingers wrap around the cool metal of the gun handle. It takes her less than a second to withdraw the gun, flick the safety off, and press the barrel against the back of his head, and then, with a soft pop that is choked by the silencer, there is a spray of red and he collapses to the floor.

Tucking the gun back into her trousers, Villanelle prods the man’s limp body with the toe of her shoe to roll him onto his back, pleased to see that his eyes are glassy and devoid of life. A pool of blood slowly grows beneath him, framing his head with a crimson halo.

Now to stage the scene for Eve.

He is a big man, which makes moving his body a bit of a challenge, but Villanelle persists. She hooks a hand beneath each of his armpits and starts to haul him over to where she intends to leave the body, leaving a smear of red across the floorboards as she drags him through the puddle of his own blood along the way. It’ll be a bitch for the janitors to clean up once they find his body, but Villanelle does not care about that, nor does she particularly care about getting blood on her clothes. It won’t show up against the black fabric unless somebody peers closely and Villanelle plans to get changed in one of the gallery's public restrooms before she leaves and discard the clothes somewhere on her way back to the hotel.

With a thin sheen of sweat on her forehead from the exertion of dragging the body across the floor, Villanelle shifts the body into a seated position against the wall beneath a painting of a woman and lets him slump there. 

Wiping her hands on her pants, Villanelle takes a step back to admire the scene. With the body now in position beneath the painting, there is just one final thing that Villanelle needs to do before she can slip out of the gallery undetected. She reaches into the pocket of her pants and pulls out the switchblade that had been concealed there, pressing the little button so that the blade flicks out. 

There is a smile on Villanelle’s face as she stalks over to the body again, slices open the buttons on the front of his shirt, and cuts into his flesh with the tip of the blade.


	8. assassin radar

“We’re getting nowhere,” sighs Eve, slumping back in her seat dejectedly. “I really thought we had her when we got the sketch drawn up but there’s nothing. No name, no DNA. Nothing.”

“She may as well be a ghost,” Elena says unhelpfully.

“Except that I know she’s real. We met her in that coffee shop, remember?” Eve runs an exasperated hand through her hair, loosening it from the confines of the elastic and running her fingers through their curly lengths, before she lets out another groan of frustration and says, “We  _ met _ her and we’ve still got nothing on her.”

“We’ll get her eventually,” says Bill. “We just need to know what we’re looking for.”

“Did you get anything on the Ukrainian guy’s son, Kenny?” asks Eve, although she already knows the answer. It has been more than a week since they added Artem Kravchenko’s strangled corpse to the board, and Eve knows that Kenny would tell her the moment he found anything suspicious.

“Nothing that I can find,” answers Kenny, with a regretful shake of his head. “I’m going through it all a second time, just in case I missed something the first time, but he’s clean. His finances are a mess so he’s definitely got the motive of inheriting his father’s millions, but his emails and phone records are all in order. If he’s involved in something dodgy, he’s doing it from burner phones and secret accounts.”

“Well I can’t go to Carolyn and tell her that we’ve hit a wall,” says Eve. “She’s trusted us with this. But at the moment it seems like we’re just waiting for the killer to strike again and hoping that she slips up next time.”

“I’ve started compiling a list of influential people who have died over the last few months,” Bill tells her. “None of them have stood out to me yet but I’ll send across what I’ve got so far if you like and you can take another look at them. You know her better than I do.”

“Thanks, Bill,” says Eve, smiling her thanks at him. “But right now it feels as though I don’t really know her at all.”

The office falls silent for a few moments, filled only with the sound of computer keys clicking, until it is broken by the chime of Eve’s computer telling her that she has a new email.

“There you go,” says Bill. “See if any of those light up your assassin radar.”

Bill is right about the first two on the list. The first is a man in his late sixties who seems to have suffered from a heart condition, while the second was killed in an incident involving a drunk driver. Eve ignores them both and moves onto the third death on Bill’s list instead.

As soon as Eve reads that the third person died from a gunshot wound to the head while visiting a German art gallery, she is interested. Their assassin, after all, is earning herself a reputation as somebody who likes to kill in public places. And even if this isn’t their girl, it still fascinates Eve as she starts to look into it further. She stares at photos of the crime scene with a morbid fascination, unable to tear her eyes away despite the gruesome smear of blood across the floor from where he was shot to where his body was found.

A gunshot wound to the head - surely that would have killed him almost instantly, which rules out the possibility that he crawled away himself, before dying moments later against a nearby wall? But that means that his killer would have been the one to move him.

Why move a body after the victim is already dead? Eve can only think of one reason for moving a body, which is to dispose of evidence that it was ever there in the first place, but that was clearly not the murderer’s aim here. 

Eve tries to put herself in the killer’s position, desperate to understand their rationality. If she had just murdered somebody, particularly in a public place such as an art gallery, she would want to remove herself from the scene of the crime as soon as possible. She definitely wouldn’t fuss around with moving the body several feet away from where it fell, only to leave it slumped against a nearby wall. 

Eve squints at the picture of the crime scene again, enlarging the image so that she can zoom in on the body. But on closer inspection, it is not the body that attracts Eve’s attention, but instead the painting that the body has been moved to sit beneath. She paid very little attention to it before, a dark canvas with a few blocks of much lighter colour that had been too distant for her to discern what it was before. Now that she sees it up close, Eve realises that it is a portrait of a woman. Her nude torso is the most prominent part of the painting, surrounded by black, while the woman’s face is almost creepy in the way that it is shrouded in shadows. Eve is captivated and intimidated by the woman in the painting in equal measure, unable to tear her eyes away.

It’s probably nothing, but the fact that the killer has moved the body to sit beneath this painting in particular is playing on Eve’s mind. She crops the picture of the crime scene until it is just the painting, then opens up a search engine and runs a reverse image search. The results that pop up are pages of similar paintings, portraits of other people that use almost identical dark colour palettes.

It isn’t until Eve reaches the bottom of the second page of images that she finds what she is looking for. An identical image to the painting in the photo of the crime scene almost jumps out of the screen at Eve and she cannot click on it quickly enough. It leads her to a page of German text that Eve doesn’t understand, but there is also a larger version of the painting, as well as a caption giving the title of the painting and the artist's name.

_ DIE SÜNDE - FRANZ VON STUCK _

Eve looks at the painting again and feels the hairs on the back of her neck slowly rise to attention. She shudders, an awful chill running down her spine as if somebody has just slipped an ice cube down the back of her shirt. The woman in the painting is creepy, but that’s not quite it. Eve feels as though she is being observed from a distance, an unsettling feeling bubbling away in her gut. This feels like their assassin, but Eve isn’t sure where the instinct that is screaming that at her is coming from, because it’s just a dead body slumped beneath a painting of-

“Wait,” says Eve, feeling her pulse quicken as she realises what she’s looking at. “What about this one, Bill?”

“Which one?” Bill asks, as he looks up from his computer.

“The German art gallery shooting that took place two days ago.”

“You think that could have been our assassin?” asks Bill, frowning as he gets to his feet and crosses over to Eve’s desk. He peers at her screen as Eve switches back to the crime scene photos, then he comments, “What a big mess.”

“Let’s see,” says Elena, rolling her chair over and craning her neck to look past Bill at the pictures. “That’s a lot of blood.”

“This one bothered me when I saw it but I wrote it off as irrelevant because there’s no way that he was killed by a woman,” explains Bill.

“Why not?” asks Elena.

“Because the killer moved the body,” answers Bill, pointing at the trail of blood across the floor to where the body rests. “The victim was a big chap. He would have been difficult to move and I think it’s unlikely a woman was able to move the body.”

“Unlikely, but not impossible,” points out Eve. “It bothered me too because why would you move a body? She shot him in the head and he would have died pretty much instantly. Surely she would want to get away from the scene as fast as possible?”

“She?” Bill repeats back at her, raising an eyebrow at Eve. “You’re sure that our assassin was responsible for this one?”

“She moved him to that painting,” says Eve, pointing at the image on the computer monitor of the victim’s body slumped below the painting of the half-naked woman. “Why that one in particular?”

Eve minimises the photograph and opens up the webpage that she found from the reverse image search. The text at the side of the screen is all in German that Eve doesn’t understand, so she just looks at the painting instead and the words beneath it.

“D- die …” Eve attempts to read.

“ _ Die Sünde _ ,” Bill reads aloud, in perfectly accented German. “‘The Sin.’ Hang on, is that a snake around her neck?”

Eve squints at the picture and recoils when she realises that the dark shape surrounding the woman’s body has a pair of eerie eyes that she hadn’t previously noticed. It makes sense now, knowing who the woman in the painting is.

“Wait,  _ the _ sin?” Elena speaks up. “You’re talking about the original sin, right? The woman in the painting is Eve? I mean, not our Eve. But  _ Eve _ Eve.”

“Adam’s Eve,” explains Bill. 

“Hey!” protests Elena. “Let’s not define women by the men in their lives. Eve was a big girl who doomed humankind all by herself.”

Eve has never felt any particular kinship with her biblical namesake, but she cannot help but wonder if that is the message that this assassin is trying to send. And if it  _ is, _ then it means that the assassin has learned of Eve and the team’s effort to hunt her down and is taunting them. 

A performance - that’s what each kill is to this psychopath. And this kill is a performance specifically for Eve.

“Bill, can you get on the phone to the German authorities and ask them to send across everything they have on this case?” Eve asks. “I want to find proof that this is our killer’s work.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Bill says as he returns to his desk.

“And what if it is her?” asks Elena, worry etched on her face. “Is she trying to send a message that she knows about you? About  _ us? _ Aren’t you worried? What if she comes for you next?”

“She won’t,” Eve insists. “She likes the attention. It’s all a game to her and if she hurts us then she loses her players.”

“I just don’t want this to come back and bite you on the arse,” says Elena, before her eyes widen and she adds, “Or worse!”

“It won’t. If this kill  _ is _ her, then I don’t think it’s a bad thing that she knows I’m on her trail. This proves that, don’t you think?” Eve gestures at her computer screen, where the website showing the painting is still up. “She’s showing off for  _ us _ now, and it’s only a matter of time before she gets careless.”

“Or a matter of time before she gets bored and comes after you personally,” Elena counters with a grimace. “I don’t think I like the idea of playing games with an actual psychopath but it’s clearly getting you excited.”

Choosing to ignore Elena’s comment and Eve returns her attention to her computer. She opens up the website showing the painting and, realising that it is the website for the very art gallery that the murder was committed in, she uses her mouse to highlight the block of German text and pastes it into an online translation tool. The resulting paragraph in English is full of grammatical errors that could be much better translated if she asked Bill to do it, but it makes enough sense to confirm that the painting is depicting the biblical Eve and the serpent who led her to temptation.

Is the message that the assassin is trying to send by moving the body beneath this particular painting as straightforward as simply making a connection between names and showing off that she knows Eve is on her trail? Or is it more than that? Is the assassin trying to lead Eve astray in the same way that the serpent led the other Eve into the path of sin?

“Eve?” says Bill, from the other side of the office, pulling Eve out of her musings. “The German authorities have emailed across some more information about that murder and I think you’re going to want to see this.”

Eve can feel each ominous thud of her heart against her ribcage as she gets to her feet and crosses over to Bill’s desk. The crease of his frown fills her with anxiety as she approaches, tentatively moving to stand behind him so that she can see the screen. She is vaguely aware of Kenny and Elena coming to stand beside her too, the whole team huddled around Bill to see what he has discovered, but Eve shifts her entire focus onto the image on Bill’s screen.

If it were possible for Eve’s heart to leap out of her body via her throat, then it would in this moment. It takes a few seconds for her to realise what she is looking at, but when she does, it stuns her into disbelief.

On the screen of Bill’s computer are two photos side by side, almost identical in nature. They show the body of the man who was murdered in Munich, but the pictures have been taken from much closer up than the one Eve previously saw, cropping out the painting below which he is slumped. The new perspective allows Eve to see something that wasn’t visible in the more distant shot, with the photo on the left side of the screen revealing a patch of blood soaked into the front of his shirt over his abdomen. The second photo has been taken from the same angle, but a hand wearing a latex glove reaches in from out of frame and peels aside the bloodstained shirt to reveal the source of the blood.

Oh  _ shit. _

There, on the victim’s stomach, just to the right of his navel, are the letters ‘EP’, carved into his flesh with a blade.

Eve feels herself start to go a little bit lightheaded. She reaches out with one hand and grips the back of Bill’s chair for support, while her vision starts to blur in her peripherals until the only thing she can see is the picture. 

Those are her initials. The assassin has carved  _ Eve’s _ initials onto the man’s stomach, immortalised in blood. And there must be hundreds of different two letter combinations that she could have gone for, which means that fact that she has picked these particular two is too improbable to be a coincidence.

Of course, just as damning is the fact that the killer has carved the letters onto the exact spot where Eve has the ‘V’ on her own stomach.

Her skin burns where the mark is, as if somebody has set fire to the front of her shirt. Eve lifts a hand to her stomach and rests her palm over the mark, the skin sensitive to her touch, even through the material of her shirt.

“Well I guess that answers that particular question.”

Kenny’s voice is what snaps Eve out of her trance, voicing aloud the same conclusion that she has just reached in her own mind. Eve looks away from the screen quickly, only to find that the other three are all watching her intently, gauging her reaction. She drops her hand from her stomach and tries to act indifferent.

“So what?” Eve shrugs, unable to make eye contact with any of her colleagues, so she settles for staring at the wall beyond Bill’s computer instead. “We already had suspicions. Like Kenny said, now it’s just confirmed.”

“Eve, you know this means that she’s got one too, right?” says Elena, resting a concerned hand on Eve’s arm just below the crook of her elbow.

“So it’s professional,” says Eve. “I’m destined to be the one to catch her.”

“Do you think  _ she _ sees it like that?” asks Bill.

“This is big, Eve,” continues Elena. “I know I’m always the one preaching that these marks mean nothing, but she’s a bloody psychopath. You have no idea what she thinks of these marks. Or what she’s going to do next.”

“It’s fine,” says Eve, sparing one final glance to the gruesome letters on the victim’s stomach, before she forces herself to look away and return to her own desk. “She’s just trying to send me a message.”

“Exactly,” insists Elena, following Eve across the office and leaning against the side of Eve’s desk. “She knows your name and she’s probably got your initials on her body. What next? What if she comes looking for you?”

“Then it’ll make our job a hell of a lot easier!”

“I really think we should tell Carolyn,” says Elena. “This is a big development and I think she needs to know.”

“No!” protests Eve. “Carolyn doesn’t need to know. Not yet, at least. This is my mark and I don’t want her to know about it.”

“Back me up Bill!” pleads Elena.

As both Eve and Elena turn to look at Bill, he just shrinks back in his chair and holds his hands up in surrender.

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” he replies. “If Eve doesn’t want Carolyn to know then it’s her decision.”

“Kenny?” says Elena, in one final plea.

Kenny hesitates before answering, his eyes flitting between Eve and Elena. There is a brief moment in which Eve wonders if the mark on his arm, though concealed by the sleeve of his polo shirt, will persuade him to sign with Elena, but he eventually shakes his head.

“Sorry Elena,” says Kenny, shooting her an apologetic glance, before he elaborates by saying, “I don’t think that we should tell Carolyn about this. And I trust Eve.”

“Thank you Kenny,” says Eve, giving him a grateful smile. She can’t imagine how mortifying it would be to have to admit to Carolyn Martens that the assassin she has asked them to trace has Eve’s initials on her stomach.

“Fine,” Elena says with a frown, disgruntled at being outvoted three to one about telling Carolyn about the marks. “So what  _ is _ our next step?”

Eve pauses for a few seconds to collect her thoughts, which feel a little bit as though they’ve been put in a blender and torn to shreds by this latest discovery. The confirmation of the one thing that Eve has been trying to pretend isn’t real may have answered one question, but it’s raised a dozen others too. 

What does the ‘V’ stand for? That is the biggest question on Eve’s mind. The killer must know Eve’s name now, for her to have connected a mark on her stomach to somebody who might learn about the body in the art gallery. And with Eve’s name, the assassin would only have to do a little bit of digging to gain access to all sorts of other private information. All Eve has is a letter on her stomach and the memory of a face.

There are other questions too. Why has the universe, after more than forty years of letting Eve quietly get on with her own life, decided to pair her with an actual psychopath? How did the assassin find out about Eve? Why has she decided to etch Eve’s initials onto this particular body?

Well, there is one thing they could do to get answers...

“We go to Munich,” Eve answers Elena’s question. “She wants my attention, so let’s show her that we have it.”

“All of us?” asks Kenny. “Shouldn’t some of us stay here and continue working on what we’ve got already?”

“Probably,” Eve concedes.

Eve glances across at Elena, who immediately shakes her head and holds her hands up in protest.

“Don’t look at me!” she says, shaking her head at the suggestion. “I’m not chasing a deadly assassin across Europe. I’m very happy with staying at home and staying alive. Anyway, Bill is the one who actually speaks German.”

Eve acknowledges this with a small incline of her head, then shifts her attention onto Bill instead.

“She has a point,” Eve says. “What do you say, Bill? Fancy a few days in Munich with me?”

“Are you sure you want me there?” asks Bill, a slow smile spreading across his face. “I mean, I don’t want to be a third wheel for you and your soulmate.”

Eve glares at him, unimpressed.

“Okay, for that you don’t get a choice,” she tells him. “You’re coming with me, end of discussion. Kenny and Elena, are you both alright to hold down the fort here for a couple of days?”

Eve doesn’t miss the way that Kenny and Elena make a point of not looking at each other as they both nod, and she remembers that they have each other’s marks. Neither of them have spoken to Eve about it since that first day, and Eve wonders if they’ve even mentioned it to each other yet. Eve knows that they both claimed indifference to the marks, but there is a part of her that thinks they would make a cute couple and wonders whether two or three days alone with each other will be enough to give them a nudge in each other’s direction.

“Fine with me.”

“Not a problem.”

They both mumble their responses at the same time, and Eve smiles past the ache in her abdomen that has been there since she saw the assassin’s artwork on the newest body. 

At least this case has some direction now.

“Let’s go to Munich!”

* * *

There are few things that Villanelle enjoys more than being correct. Being right about something is basically just evidence that she is amazing.

Being right about Eve Polastri being the woman from the coffee shop is a euphoric feeling. Villanelle lurks outside the gallery and waits, nearly going giddy with excitement when a taxi pulls up across the street and the woman she’s been thinking about every time she masturbates for the last few weeks gets out of the vehicle. She looks even more majestic than Villanelle remembers, and though her hair is pushed back into a bun on the back of her head, there are a few loose flyaways close to her hairline that bluster about in the autumnal wind. Villanelle’s hands itch to touch it, to wind one of those curls around her fingers and loosen that thick mane from its elastic confines.

Eve’s clothes leave something to be desired. It seems that Villanelle must have conveniently pushed that part of their first encounter out of her mind, and she screws up her nose in disgust at the practical waterproof coat that doesn’t quite manage to conceal the crinkles of the blouse she wears underneath. It’s difficult to tell from across the street, but Villanelle suspects the shirt may be a cotton-polyester blend, which makes her feel a little bit nauseous.

Villanelle will have to do something about this awful wardrobe when they’re together.

A man follows Eve out of the taxi, in his sixties and balding on the top of his head. The pair seem close, laughing together about something that Villanelle is too far away to be able to eavesdrop on, and she sincerely hopes that he is just a work colleague and not anything more.

Eve and her companion are greeted by an official looking man in a suit at the entrance to the gallery, then all three of them bypass the sign left outside the door to let visitors know the gallery is closed until further notice, and disappear inside the building.

Phase one of Villanelle’s plan - lure Eve Polastri to Munich - has been a success. And that was probably the hardest part. Phase two - to get Eve alone and actually have a conversation with her - will be much easier now that they are both in the same city. The companion will have to be dealt with, of course, because Villanelle cannot let her first proper conversation with her soulmate be interrupted by somebody completely irrelevant, but Villanelle is certain that she can find a way to make sure he stays out of the picture.

Eve will be occupied for much of the day, and it excites Villanelle to know that Eve will spend the entire day talking about  _ Villanelle _ , admiring  _ Villanelle’s _ latest kill, trying to work out who  _ Villanelle _ is.

Well tonight Villanelle will show her.

There are some preparations that she needs to make before she is ready to introduce herself to Eve. She will have to make a trip to the pharmacy, and she mustn’t forget to book the hotel room.

But first of all, Villanelle needs to buy a costume.

* * *

“You’ve got her on CCTV?”

Eve doesn’t know what she was expecting from their visit to Munich, but to be told that the kill was caught on camera within minutes of arriving at the scene of the crime was definitely not it.

“Yes, I sent the video across to Bill with all the other files,” says Weber, the German BND agent who is liaising with them on the case. 

To have footage of the assassin actually killing could be a complete game changer for this investigation. To be able to see more of her at all would be progress, but to actually watch her in action? Eve is … well, to say that she is excited about the prospect of watching a man get shot in the head is probably a little insensitive to the victim, but Eve wants to see this footage more than anything else in the world right now.

This CCTV is the breakthrough that they need. They’ll be able to study the assassin - her movements, her mannerisms, her kill style. And not just the kill too. If that has been caught on camera, then the staging of the body after she shot him will have been filmed too. Eve will get to watch the killer as she draws Eve’s own initials on the man’s abdomen with a knife.

Carving those letters into the victim's stomach is far more intimate than anything that Niko has done for Eve in at least the last five years, if not  _ ever. _

Eve turns to Bill, her eyes wide.

“CCTV?” she asks him. “Why didn’t we know about this sooner?”

“The German investigators were very thorough,” Bill answers with a shrug. “They sent over a lot of stuff. It’ll take Elena and Kenny a while to go through it all.”

“I will find it for you,” says Weber. “You can watch it now.”

He summons one of his colleagues with a wave of his hand. The pair start speaking in rapid German, which Bill appears to be following, and Eve is grateful for the distraction brought by her ringing phone. When she reads Elena’s name on the screen, Eve answers straight away.

“We were just talking about you,” says Eve. “How are you and Kenny getting on?”

“I’ve already told you, Eve,” comes Elena’s indignant reply. “There’s nothing going on between me and-”

“I meant with the investigation,” Eve cuts in, smiling to herself at Elena’s misunderstanding and making a mental note to revisit that topic at a later date, because there is clearly  _ something _ going on, even if it is just in Elena’s mind. “Have you discovered anything useful?”

“Oh, not really.”

The embarrassment is evident in Elena’s voice, even over the phone, and Eve doesn’t need to see Elena to be able to picture the flustered expression that will no doubt be plastered across her face.

“There’s a lot of information to sort through,” Elena presses on. “We’re still trying to sift through it all to work out what’s important and what isn’t, then we’ll go through everything in the important pile in greater detail.”

Eve hums in approval and says, “Sounds good.”

“Oh, by the way, Kenny stumbled across something interesting. Apparently there’s CCTV of her … you know, actually  _ doing _ it. Killing the guy. It confirms that it’s a woman - blonde hair, mid-twenties, athletic build.”

“Blonde?” queries Eve, because her own memory of the assassin from their admittedly brief encounter is of a brunette with bangs.

“Well we know that she likes a costume,” Elena points out. “She probably uses wigs too.”

Eve considers the idea for a few seconds, then concedes, “Yeah, I can see blonde hair working, actually. It would suit her complexion.”

Hearing Elena snort on the other end of the phone, Eve’s cheeks flush when she realises that she said that aloud, and she is quick to press on to avoid Elena commenting on it.

“So, have you seen the CCTV footage?”

“No, they didn’t send it to us,” answers Elena. “That’s why I called you. Kenny found some notes that were made from the footage - her description, her movements through the rooms of the gallery, and so on - but there were no video files in the stuff that the German authorities sent across.”

“That’s weird,” Eve says, with a frown. “Our contact here says it was sent to us. They’re just finding it now so that Bill and I can take a look.”

Hearing his own name, Bill’s head turns towards Eve and he walks towards her.

“Hang on, just give me a second,” Eve says to Elena, before lowering the phone. She covers the speaker, then hisses at Bill, “What’s happening? Have they got it?”

Bill grimaces and shakes her head apologetically.

“Apparently they’ve lost the footage.”

“Lost the - how do you  _ lose _ CCTV footage of a murder?” Eve lifts the phone back to her ear and says, “Sorry, Elena. I’ll call you back in a bit.” Ending the call with a tap of her thumb against the screen, Eve turns her attention back to Bill and adds, “Elena said that they never sent it to us either.”

“Really?” asks Bill, his eyebrows shooting up across his forehead. “Now that’s interesting.”

“How does a federal government agency lose CCTV footage of an assassination?” Eve groans, running an exasperated hand through her hair and loosening the hair tie keeping it out of her face.

“They don’t,” Bill answers, with a simple shrug.

Eve’s eyes widen as she realises what Bill is implying.

“You think it never existed?”

“I think that it  _ did _ exist, but somebody has gone to great lengths to make sure that it doesn’t anymore.”

Eve glances over at Weber and his colleague, both bent over a small laptop and murmuring conspiratorially with each other. Could one of them, or somebody else working in German intelligence, have removed all traces of this vital evidence from their systems? Eve cannot imagine that whoever ordered this assassination will want footage of the killer doing her thing to continue to exist, especially not when she has been completely anonymous for so long. But to get that footage removed before it can be shared around must mean that either the hit was ordered by the German authorities, or that the people responsible are powerful enough to have significant influence over the German intelligence service, perhaps even moles inside the organisation. And if they have people inside one government authority, how many others are they controlling from within?

“Who are we dealing with?” Eve asks Bill, shaking her head in disbelief.

“Somebody very powerful, which is why we need to be careful,” Bill answers. His eyes flick down to Eve’s stomach, then back up to her face, before he adds, “Especially you.”

“I’m always careful,” counters Eve.

“And I hope that you don’t live to regret those words.”


	9. woman to woman

Villanelle is pleased with her outfit. It had been easy enough to find a traditional German dress during her shopping trip earlier in the day, with countless shops across the city selling such costumes to tourists.

The dress itself is made of a dark green fabric, stopping just above her knees and given volume by the layers beneath the skirt. There is a red gingham apron tied around her waist, then the dress extends upwards into a bodice that is laced up at the front, accenting her cleavage which is revealed by the low neckline of the frilly blouse she wears beneath the dress. Villanelle has completed the Look by parting her hair straight down the middle and neatly plaiting each half, tying each braid with a ribbon that matches the colour of the dress.

It suits her, she decides, as she admires her reflection in the mirror before leaving her hotel room. Villanelle knows that she looks good in most things, but her blonde hair and fair complexion suit this look in particular and will allow her to blend in perfectly.

It’s laughable how predictable Eve and her companion are. Of  _ course _ they decide to visit one of the city’s largest beer halls on their first night in Munich, just as Villanelle expected them to. She could have definitely still made it work if they’d made different plans, such as going out to a restaurant for dinner or even staying in at their hotel. The outfit would have been more conspicuous elsewhere, but Villanelle knows that being able to adapt to new situations as they arise is one of the reasons why she is so good at her job.

As it is, there is no immediate need to change her plans. She follows Eve and the man as they leave their hotel and descend into the nearest U-Bahn station. They’re too engrossed in their conversation with each other to notice that they have a tail, but Villanelle hops onto a neighbouring carriage and watches them through the grimy window that adjoins the two, just to be cautious. The last thing she needs is for Eve to recognise her and cause a scene before Villanelle can get her alone.

As soon as they leave the train a few stops later and return to the streets above, Villanelle is certain that she knows exactly where they are going and splits from them, taking a different route to the beer hall. It is easy - almost  _ too  _ easy - to blend in with the other staff in outfits that are almost identical to Villanelle’s, and the hall is far too busy for anybody to pay her any attention as she fills tankards with beer and serves customers as if she works here every day.

A few minutes pass before she sees them, easy to spot because nobody else has hair quite as magnificent as Eve’s. They order beers much further up the bar, laughing and joking together in the way that people who are familiar with each other do. Villanelle feels a surge of jealousy that this man gets to spend time with Eve, with Villanelle’s soulmate, and she hopes that there is no romantic involvement there.

That would just complicate matters further. Villanelle’s current plan doesn’t allow for that to be a possibility.

With their beers in hand, the pair move away from the bar and Villanelle watches them carefully, making a note of exactly where they sit. 

Her first job - to make sure that the friend is out of the picture.

Tonight is going to be so much fun.

* * *

“Germany has the best beer in the world,” says Bill, taking a seat on the bench opposite Eve and placing two large tankards of light beer on the table between them. He lifts one of the tankards and holds it in the air between them, then says, “Prost!” before he takes a swig.

“Prost,” Eve mimics him, her American accent curling around the unfamiliar word in a way that feels very stilted, as she raises her own glass and then takes a sip. She mostly gets the frothy head that sits on top of the amber liquid, but then she takes a second sip and hums at the way the beer slides smoothly down her throat. 

“Right?” asks Bill, his eyebrows twitching upwards as he asks for Eve’s validation. “Good, isn’t it? And where better to enjoy it?”

He gestures around at the beer hall, which is large and old, with pillars that stretch from the tiled floor to the elaborately decorated ceiling. It is furnished with long wooden tables where the visitors sit on benches, dining on plates of white sausages with sauerkraut while drinking from huge tankards of beer just like the ones that Eve and Bill have. The staff all wear traditional dress - lederhosen for the men and dirndls for the women - and there is even an oompah band playing a jaunty tune in the corner.

It’s almost as if somebody has tried to cram every possible German stereotype into a single place.

“It’s definitely something,” admits Eve.

Bill must be able to tell that Eve is a little distracted, because he reaches across the table and covers one of her hands with his own, before he asks, “What’s on your mind?”

Eve lets out a frustrated sigh, then confesses, “I just can’t believe our bad luck about the CCTV!”

“I know,” agrees Bill. “When Weber first mentioned it I thought it seemed too good to be true.”

“Can you imagine how great it would have been to go back to London and tell Carolyn that we had her on camera?” says Eve, letting out groan as she drowns her sorrows in another sip of beer. “It would have been huge. Monumental, even. She’s  _ never _ been caught on CCTV before. Not actually killing, anyway.”

“She’s getting careless,” says Bill. “And as much as it pains me to admit it, I think she’s getting careless because of you.”

“I don’t know if I’d call it carelessness,” Eve counters, shaking her head. “Arrogance, perhaps. I think there is a part of her that thinks she can’t get caught. Maybe even a part of her that thinks I won’t let her get caught.”

“Because of the marks?”

Eve flings her arms out in a dramatic shrug, then says, “Maybe our assassin is a hopeless romantic.”

Bill sniggers at this.

“God, I hope not.”

“What do you think she meant by the letters she carved into the victim?” Eve asks Bill. “I mean, they’re obviously my initials but I can’t make sense of why she would do that? What message is she trying to send to me?”

“A warning perhaps,” suggests Bill. “Maybe she’s trying to deter you from looking for her. Or it could have been a really twisted love letter.”

“Bill…” Eve groans, slapping his arm playfully.

“I’m not joking,” insists Bill, though there is the faintest hint of a smile on his lips. “Perhaps she’s trying to appeal to your romantic side.”

“I don’t have a romantic side. Niko can attest to that. I forget to buy him a Valentine’s card every year.”

“And what’s his take on this whole situation?” asks Bill, looking over the brim of his tankard with interest in his eyes as he drinks from the glass.

“He doesn’t know it’s her,” Eve admits. “I told him I didn’t know who the mark was about, which was true at the time. And now we have this new policy where we just don’t talk about the marks - mine or his. We don’t even acknowledge that they’re there. We’ve been having sex in the dark so that we can’t see them.”

“Sounds healthy,” jokes Bill.

Eve wonders if she is supposed to tell Niko that she knows who gave her the mark on her stomach. Would he even want to know or would he rather she kept it to herself? The original argument that led to Eve sleeping on the couch for a few days stemmed from her keeping the mark a secret and when they made up with each other Niko expressed a desire for Eve to be honest with him. But how would he feel if he knew that Eve was connected to a world-class assassin in such a way? Would his opinion of Eve change based on this information, even if she tells him that it means nothing to her?

Once again, Eve’s mind wanders to Niko’s mark. Though he insists that Gemma will only ever be a colleague, perhaps a friend at most, Eve can’t help but see Gemma as a backup option for Niko. Since they reconciled, Eve has been trying to be the perfect wife - not staying late at work as often as she used to, trying to spend quality time with Niko when she is at home, even initiating sex more regularly than before - all in an attempt to keep him on her side. Despite his promises and assurances, Eve doesn’t want to give him a good reason to discard her in favour of Gemma, not when her own ‘backup option’ is nothing more than a heartless killer.

Sensing the turmoil in Eve’s mind, Bill leans closer across the table and gives her a reassuring smile.

“The marks don’t have to mean anything, you know,” he reminds her.

“That’s easy for you to say,” says Eve, reaching for Bill’s left hand and flipping it over to reveal the Japanese script on his palm. “You married yours.”

Bill looks down at his own mark with fondness, then back up at Eve.

“I’m going to tell you a secret,” he says, a glint of excitement passing through his eyes. “Keiko wasn’t my first.”

“First what?” 

“My first soulmate.”

“You had another?” gasps Eve.

Her own soulmate woes are suddenly forgotten as Bill reveals this new piece of information. She has worked alongside Bill for the best part of a decade and he has been married to Keiko for almost as long. Eve thinks they make the perfect pair, different enough to keep things interesting but incredibly similar in their attitudes and opinions. Bill and Keiko have come over for dinner at Eve and Niko’s house countless times and she has always been a little bit jealous of the bond that they have, being able to communicate with each other through apparent telepathy via little glances and smiles across the dinner table.

Eve struggles to imagine Bill with anybody else, and though she has heard the occasional tale of a misspent youth that paints a picture of a man much different to the one that she knows today, he has never once mentioned another soulmate.

“When I lived in Germany, I got some letters on my chest,” he explains, touching his sternum through his shirt to show her where the mark was. “To this day I still have no idea who it was. But when the letters appeared, I was desperate to know and so I slept with nearly every man and woman in Berlin trying to find somebody with the right initials. It was completely self-destructive. I think if I’d found somebody who matched my mark, I would have clung to them, even if they were the wrong person.”

Eve knows that Bill is trying to warn her against doing something rash, but his words have little meaning to Eve because the situation is completely different. For a start, Eve actually knows who her mark refers to, and though she is more than a little bit curious about their assassin, her curiosity is professional and has little to do with the mark on her stomach.

“I’m not like that,” Eve attempts to dismiss his warning, though she finds it very hard to look Bill in the eye as she says this. “Anyway, I have Niko.”

“But does Niko have you?” asks Bill, his eyebrows raised.

“Of course he does!” scoffs Eve, trying to sound outraged. “What kind of question is that?”

“Forget I even asked,” says Bill, quick to reconcile.

“Niko has a mark too, remember? And he actually knows his and sees her every day. Some slapper at work called Gemma.”

Gemma may end up being perfectly lovely, but Eve finds that picturing her as a gorgeous seductress with long legs and enormous tits actually helps, because it would be so much worse if Eve ended up losing her husband to somebody completely average.

“Okay, but Niko has integrity. I’d be more worried if you suddenly met your soulmate and started getting to know them.”

Eve almost chokes on her drink and takes a few seconds to compose herself, before she asks, “Are you saying that I don’t have integrity?”

“No, I’m saying that your integrity is selective, and I think the sudden appearance of a hottie masquerading as your soulmate, psychopath or otherwise, might cloud your judgement a little bit.”

“The only chance I have of meeting her is if we catch her,” says Eve. “We should be working twice as hard as we are to make that happen, not getting drunk on German beer.” Eve takes a long sip from her glass, despite her words, and hums in satisfaction, before she reluctantly concedes,  _ “Really _ good German beer.”

“We’re allowed to take a night off,” Bill reminds her. “After a couple of beers each we’ll both sleep really well and be able to look at the case with fresh eyes tomorrow morning. Maybe there’s another clue that we’ve missed so far.”

Eve hums in a non-verbal agreement, though her mind is still haunted by the memory of the face of the assassin who remains just a few steps ahead of them at all times.

“God, I hate her so much. It’s like she’s trying to ruin my entire life - my marriage, my job. It would be nice to know just  _ something _ about her in return for all the hassle.”

“I get it, Eve,” says Bill. “The curiosity can be almost unbearable. Just promise me that you won’t ruin something good for a connection that might not exist.” 

“I’m not about to leave Niko for anybody, least of all a psychopath.”

Niko is safe, he’s comfortable, like an old sweater that might have a couple of holes in it, still perfectly fitting and holding too much sentimental value to throw away. 

The assassin is the exact opposite of him, dangerous and unpredictable, hard edges where Niko is soft and familiar. She is a stiletto heel to Niko’s comfortable jumper, an attractive prospect at first but increasingly painful as time goes on, to the point of complete agony.

Bill is right. Sweaters are much more Eve’s thing that stilettos.

She does look good in heels though...

“Good,” Bill says in a firm voice. “I know he doesn’t set your world on fire, but he’s a good man.”

“Does Keiko set your world on fire?” 

Bill shrugs, and then replies, “Sometimes.”

Eve waits to see if Bill will elaborate on his elusive reply, but all that happens is that a slow smirk spreads across his face.

“Just to be clear, are you…?”

“I’m talking about sex,” Bill confirms, still grinning slyly at Eve.

Eve thinks of Niko and tries to figure out when the spark disappeared, when sex stopped being something exciting and became something that they do because it’s what a husband and wife are supposed to do. Eve knows that there must have been a time when Niko made her feel truly alive, but she struggles to associate that feeling of excitement with anybody other than the assassin. Niko makes her happy, he makes her feel appreciated, but he doesn’t turn her inside out with lust.

Maybe he never did.

Maybe that’s why she never got his mark.

“You believe in them, don’t you?” Eve asks Bill, gesturing towards the mark on Bill’s palm, which he traces fondly with the fingers of his other hand. “Elena thinks it’s all bullshit and Kenny is just indifferent but you believe the marks are real, right?”

Bill lets out a sigh that hangs heavy with introspection.

“I believe there is a reason for them,” he tells her, a more serious expression on his face than Eve has seen so far tonight. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s true love, just that there is a connection between two souls. Maybe you’re supposed to catch her. Maybe you’re the one who brings her down.”

Eve nods thoughtfully, hoping that what Bill says is true.

“What would you do if your mark changed again?” she asks him. “If Keiko’s initials disappeared and somebody else’s showed up? Would it change anything?”

Bill shakes his head and answers, “Not a thing.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive,” Bill says firmly. “There was a time when that kind of thing would excite me, but I’m too old for that now. I’ve had my fun, but I’ve got Keiko and Emiri now. With or without the mark, they’re my life.”

Eve contemplates this for a few seconds, then laughs under her breath as she shakes her head and reaches for her drink.

“You sappy git.”

Bill drains the rest of his beer and puts the glass down on the table with a thud. Getting to his feet and climbing over 

“Come on. Drink up, I’m buying you another.”

Eve eyes up her glass, still half full of amber liquid, and shakes her head.

“No more for me,” she tells him. “I’ll get bloated if I have another after this and then I won’t sleep well.”

“Your loss,” shrugs Bill. “Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be back in a sec.”

As Bill moves towards the bar to buy himself a second drink, Eve’s hand instinctively goes to touch her stomach, pressing her fingers into the mark through the material of her top.

If it’s purely professional, if Bill is correct that she is just supposed to be the one to catch this woman, Eve decides that she can be okay with that.

* * *

Eve Polastri is beautiful when she sleeps. 

She is curled up on her side with the covers pulled up to her neck, knees tucked up to her chest so that she takes up the minimum amount of space on the bed. Villanelle smiles to herself as she realises that they will be compatible bedfellows when the time comes - after all, she likes nothing more than to stretch her long limbs out across as much of the mattress as possible while she sleeps.

Or perhaps Eve would want Villanelle to spoon her. Villanelle has never been one for spooning before, but that’s less about the actual position itself and more because she hasn’t slept with anybody that she likes enough to spoon them. There is no good end of the deal when it comes to spooning, either you get a mouthful of hair or you have to deal with somebody breathing down your neck all night. But Eve is Villanelle’s soulmate and she would do anything for her, which includes overheating at night to hold her from behind.

Maybe Eve would rather face Villanelle while she sleeps. Villanelle would like that too - she would be able to stare at Eve’s peaceful features just as she does now, to admire Eve’s flawless skin and the curls that splay out across the pillow, the way that her full lips are slightly parted and she lets out soft little noises sometimes when she exhales.

It’s not creepy to watch Eve in her sleep. It would be creepy if Villanelle  _ wasn’t  _ Eve’s soulmate, but she is, which makes it romantic instead. This is all just a big romantic gesture - luring Eve to Munich, working out what hotel she is staying at, breaking into the room in the middle of the night and watching Eve’s peaceful slumber from the chair in the corner.

It’s as romantic as hearts and flowers.

Shit. Flowers. Should Villanelle have brought Eve some flowers?

Maybe next time…

As nice as it is to watch Eve sleep, to commit each beautiful detail of her face to memory, it’s not why Villanelle is here. She hasn’t gone to such extraordinary lengths to be in the same room as Eve, only to  _ not _ have a conversation with her.

Villanelle pushes herself up out of her chair and stalks silently over to the bed, stopping only to check her appearance in the mirror as she passes. Satisfied that she looks incredible enough to greet her soulmate, Villanelle approaches the bed and leans over Eve’s sleeping form. 

“Eve,” she hisses softly.

When Eve does not stir, she tries again, slightly louder this time.

“Eve.” 

Still nothing.

Reaching out with one hand, Villanelle gently prods Eve’s shoulder with her index finger and whispers, “Eve, it’s me.”

Eve stirs slightly, but her eyes remain closed and she just pulls the covers tighter around her shoulders as she lets out a sleepy hum.

God, she’s beautiful. It really is a shame to have to wake her up.

Villanelle gets bolder and uses her fingertips to brush aside some of Eve’s hair that is falling across her face, then rests the palm of her hand against the soft skin of Eve’s cheek.

Eve subconsciously leans into the touch, a tiny smile gracing her lips which seems to spread out through the point when their skin touches, along Villanelle’s outstretched arm, until she is smiling down at Eve too. As Eve continues to rouse, Villanelle squats down beside the bed so that her face is at Eve’s eye level, watching in delight as Eve’s eyelashes flutter open and she rubs at her face sleepily.

Eve blinks once, then twice, before the cutest little crease forms between her eyes as she frowns at Villanelle in confusion, perhaps still not quite awake enough to fully understand what is happening.

“Hi, Eve,” says Villanelle, a slow grin spreading across her face. “You’ve been looking for me?”

Eve’s eyes blink suddenly wide, then she rasps, “Oh my god,” before letting out a hoarse yell.

“No!” Villanelle cries out, shifting the hand on Eve’s cheek down so that it covers her mouth instead. “Shh! Stop screaming!”

Eve thrashes about on the bed, trying to free herself from the covers. With her hand still over Eve’s mouth, Villanelle quickly vaults onto the bed and mounts Eve, one knee on either side of Eve’s hips to pin her down to the bed.

“Stop it!” says Villanelle, wrapping the fingers over her free hand around Eve’s throat and squeezing just hard enough to temporarily limit her air supply. “I don’t want to kill you!”

Eve’s eyes go wide, almost bulging out of her skull as Villanelle’s fingers constrict around her windpipe, but the muffled screaming against Villanelle’s other palm stops.

“I came to talk,” continues Villanelle.

She relinquishes her grip on Eve’s throat and Eve starts to gasp and splutter as she draws air back into her lungs. Villanelle lifts her other hand too, but remains straddled across Eve’s hips, ready to pounce if Eve starts to scream again.

“Are you going to behave?” Villanelle asks, arching an eyebrow at Eve. “Don’t make me smother you with a pillow. That’s not why I’m here.”

“Why are you here?” 

An American accent? Now  _ that _ Villanelle wasn’t expecting. She wonders what else about Eve Polastri will end up surprising her.

“To talk,” Villanelle answers with a little shrug. “Woman to woman. I know you’ve been looking for me too. I’m going to get off you, but if you are thinking of trying something stupid, remember that I am faster and stronger than you.” 

Villanelle climbs off the bed and checks out her appearance. Her outfit, which cost nearly two thousand Euros in this afternoon’s shopping spree, is slightly crinkled from her tussle with Eve on the bed, and she smooths it down with the palms of her hands until she is satisfied with the way she looks again.

When she turns back to the bed, she finds Eve now sitting up against the headboard, hugging her knees as she regards Villanelle with caution. There is fear in her eyes, and does she not realise that Villanelle is her soulmate? That she has nothing to be afraid of?

“How did you get in here?” Eve asks, her voice still husky from being choked.

Villanelle’s eyes flicker over to the sliding doors that lead out onto the balcony, then she answers elusively, “I have my ways.”

Villanelle returns to the chair she was sitting in earlier as she watches Eve sleep and moves it closer to the bed, before taking a seat again. She pulls a knife out of her pocket - the same knife that she used to carve Eve’s initials into her most recent victim just a few days ago, and flicks it open. She has no intention of using it, but she can feel Eve’s gaze drop to the blade and hopes that it provides sufficient warning against trying something stupid.

“My colleague is next door,” says Eve.

It feels like it is a thinly veiled threat, or at least a warning of her own to stop Villanelle from doing anything to harm Eve. Not that Villanelle  _ would _ harm Eve - that would be like hurting a part of herself. Besides, Eve’s warning holds no actual weight, considering the fact that Villanelle dealt with the colleague much earlier in the night.

“He won’t be able to help you,” says Villanelle, twirling the knife between her skilled fingers. “He’s not going to hear you if you scream.”

Eve’s eyes widen suddenly.

“What have you done to Bill?”

“Relax, Eve,” says Villanelle, rolling her eyes. “I slipped a mild sedative into his drink earlier. He is sleeping like a little baby.”

“You did  _ what?” _

Villanelle smiles to herself in smug satisfaction. As expected, her earlier disguise worked perfectly. Nobody ever looks for something that is right in front of them. They were both far too absorbed in their own lives to consider that the assassin they’re looking for would dare to get that close, and it had been far too easy to spike the drink of Eve’s companion when he came up to the bar alone to order another beer.

“Didn’t you see me? At the beer hall? Did you not feel me watching you?” Villanelle pauses, then adds, “Shame. I looked really cute in lederhosen.”

“What do you want from me?” Eve asks.

“I want to see your mark.”

“My…” Eve pauses, then says, “I don’t have a mark.”

The lie itself is almost as cute as the little twitch in Eve’s eyebrows as she feigns confusion.

“Eve, please,” Villanelle snorts. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

Villanelle stands up and untucks the hem of her shirt from the waistband of her trousers. She can feel Eve’s eyes burning holes through her body as she lifts the fabric to reveal her stomach, where the letters ‘EP’ sit, inky black against her pale skin, even in the lamplight.

“It’s not me,” lies Eve, though the way that her eyes are fixated on Villanelle’s mark with a combination of disbelief and awe. “I don’t have uncommon initials. Bill’s daughter...”

“Your friend’s daughter isn’t tracking me down on behalf of MI6 though, is she?” Villanelle points out. “This is fate, Eve. You and I are supposed to meet.”

“I don’t think the universe intended for you to break into my hotel room,” Eve replies, dragging her eyes back up to Villanelle’s face with a thoroughly unimpressed look in her eyes.

So this is how it’s going to be, huh? Eve wants to play hard to get. It’s lucky that Villanelle is very determined when she knows what she wants, and right now she wants to see Eve’s mark.

“Are you going to let me see it?” Villanelle asks once more, letting the hem of her shirt fall down to cover her stomach again, before she tucks it back into her waistband, careful not to crinkle the material. 

“Why don’t you give me your name and I can tell you if the letters match?”

She’s clever too. Villanelle can only feel herself getting more and more excited with each second that she spends in Eve’s company. Nothing, not even the wild fantasies of Eve and this moment that have been keeping her awake night after night, could ever have lived up to reality. 

But if Eve wants to learn her name, she’s going to have to work a little harder than this.

“Nice try,” smirks Villanelle, shaking her head. “Which letters did you get?” When Eve says nothing in response, Villanelle rolls her eyes and clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, before she continues, “Eve, I already told you that I’m not going to hurt you.”

Villanelle makes a show of flicking the blade of the knife back into its handle, then leans across to set the blade on top of a nearby dresser, where it is out of reach of both of them. She holds her hands up in a surrender, palms facing outwards to show that she has no intention of harming Eve.

Eve has no reason to know about the other knife concealed inside her shoe, nor the length of garroting wire coiled up in her back pocket. If Eve continues to behave herself, Villanelle won’t need either.

“Happy now?” asks Villanelle, raising her eyebrows at Eve in a challenge.

Eve waits a bit longer, clearly reluctant to give Villanelle what she wants. But then, with her eyes still firmly fixated on Villanelle as if afraid that Villanelle will reach for the knife again if she looks anywhere else, she sits up properly and lets her hands fall to the bottom of her pyjama top. Villanelle’s eyes follow the hem of the t-shirt as Eve drags it upwards, wondering how high she’ll lift it. But then the hypothetical glimpse of underboob no longer matters, because Eve has an enormous ‘V’ on her stomach and it might be the sexiest thing that Villanelle has ever seen.

Eve’s mark is in exactly the same place as Villanelle’s, just to one side of her navel, though slightly bigger. Villanelle had been curious as to whether Eve would have one letter or two and she is pleased that it is just the one. Villanelle hasn’t gone by her birth name in years and she doesn’t like the thought of giving anybody, not even her soulmate, access to her past. Villanelle doubts that Eve knows very much about her at all at the moment, not even what the ‘V’ stands for, and she quite likes the idea of leaving Eve to figure that stuff out by herself. Like a test of worthiness, just like leaving those clues in the art gallery. Having to listen to Konstantin berating her over the phone for ten minutes for being careless had been worth it when Eve showed up in Munich.

“That is  _ so _ sexy,” says Villanelle, her voice barely above a whisper as she stares at the mark committing it to memory. “Can I touch it?”

Eve lets the material of her t-shirt fall down and cover the mark, as if covering it up is going to stop Villanelle from lusting over it. It’s futile - Villanelle can see that ‘V’ on the inside of her eyelids each time she blinks.

“No.”

“You can touch mine,” offers Villanelle, one of her hands going for the hem of her top again.

“I don’t want to touch yours.”

“Why not?”

Eve hesitated for a few seconds, and then answers, “Because I’m married.”

“To..?” Villanelle’s eyes flick to her right, gesturing with a little tilt of her head at the wall that stands between this room and the adjacent one where the man Eve referred to as Bill is currently passed out for the foreseeable future.

“To  _ Bill? _ God, no. He’s just a colleague.”

The face of ridicule that Eve pulls at the mere suggestion fills Villanelle with relief because it would ruin her romantic night with Eve if she had to vault across to another balcony to murder the man next door. But Villanelle’s relief is only momentary, because if the drugged, easy-to-kill man next door is not Eve’s husband, that means somebody else is instead, an obstacle that will not be quite as easy to knock down at this present moment.

Villanelle shudders slightly at the thought. She has had to deal with husbands in the past, which means that she knows from experience that it has the potential to end badly.

This time will be different, Villanelle reassures herself. This time there are two marks instead of just one.

“You’ve seen it now,” says Eve. “So tell me this, what does the ‘V’ stand for?”

Villanelle takes a couple of steps over to the bed and perches on the very end, far enough away from Eve that she doesn’t think Villanelle is up to something. She  _ isn’t _ up to something, she just wants somewhere to sit, but Villanelle can tell that Eve is wary of every move that she makes.

“I can’t give you  _ all _ the answers,” Villanelle says, as she tucks one leg up beneath the other.

“You haven’t given me any answers.”

Villanelle smiles. This is what she has been craving her entire life. Somebody who will challenge her, somebody who will bite back. Over seven billion people on the planet and every single one of them has bored Villanelle, until now.

Until Eve.

This is fun. This is the kind of thrill that Villanelle only ever gets from killing.

“Then ask away,” says Villanelle. “I am an open book.”

She spreads her arms out, gesturing to show just how open she is.

“Who do you work for?”

Straight in there with the difficult questions.  _ That’s my girl, _ Villanelle thinks to herself.

“I don’t know. I just kill whoever they want me to kill.”

“You have no idea who asks you to do it?”

Villanelle shrugs.

“Nope.”

“Surely you’re a little bit curious?” 

Villanelle would be lying if she said that she wasn’t curious, but she knows not to ask questions. In her line of work, curiosity can get a person killed. Villanelle knows to keep her mouth shut and her eyes forward.

“As long as they pay me well, I don’t care.”

“How much do they pay you?” asks Eve, firing question after question at Villanelle, who is beginning to wonder if her ‘open book’ comment was perhaps a little too encouraging of Eve’s curiosity that borders on annoying.

Curiosity will get  _ Eve _ killed, if she is not careful.

Not by Villanelle, though. Villanelle would never hurt Eve.

“A lot. I am very rich, Eve.” Villanelle leans slightly closer to Eve, propping up her body weight up on one hand. “I could take care of you, buy you anything you wanted. You wouldn’t need to work anymore.”

Eve folds her arms across her chest and replies, “I like my job.”

“Because  _ I’m _ your job?” Villanelle challenges her.

Eve does not reply, but she regards Villanelle through slightly narrowed eyes, as if she is an unusual specimen in a lab to be examined.

“Your husband,” barks Villanelle, feeling slightly uneasy with the way that Eve looks at her. It’s not cool, Villanelle is supposed to be the one here with the upper hand. “What’s his name?”

Eve stays quiet, as if she thinks that the only way Villanelle can possibly learn this information is if she opens her mouth and tells her.

“You know I’ll find it out anyway,” Villanelle points out, raising an eyebrow.

Eve remains silent for a few more seconds, before she reluctantly conceded and says, “Niko.”

“Niko,” repeats Villanelle. The name leaves a bitter taste in her mouth. “You don’t have his mark, do you?”

“No,” admits Eve.

“And does he have yours?”

“No.”

Excellent news all round. It seems that the stars really are aligning in Villanelle’s favour. She can still sense some hesitation from Eve, but that’s probably to be expected. Eve has, after all, only just woken up to find that her soulmate is in the same room. All she needs is a bit of time to fully get used to the idea.

“I don’t know what you think is going on,” says Eve, “But if you think that I’m going to leave my husband for you because of these marks, then you’re wrong.”

Villanelle’s jaw clenches instinctively. Eve is stubborn, that’s fine. Villanelle would probably find Eve incredibly boring if she didn’t provide a little bit of a challenge.

“Why do you like him more than you like me?”

The look that Eve gives when she hears Villanelle’s very reasonable question, is as if it isn’t reasonable at all, but instead entirely ludicrous.

“Because I love him and I made a commitment to him and that doesn’t just change because of this.”

“Is it his penis?” asks Villanelle, her question fuelled by jealousy. It must be his penis - Villanelle can’t imagine this random man having anything else that is better than what Villanelle has. “Does he have a massive cock? Is that what it is?”

Eve’s face turns slightly pink as she gets flustered.

“It’s a completely normal size, thank you. Not that it’s any of your business.”

“If it’s a dick thing, I can give you any size you want,” Villanelle promises, thinking of her nice little collection in her apartment in Paris. “If you want a little one, or one that is big and girthy - I can do it all. I’ve even got one that curves a little towards the tip, I think you’d probably  _ really _ like that one.”

“Stop it,” says Eve, her forehead creased into a cute little frown.

Ignoring Eve’s protest, Villanelle continues, “Or you can have the dick, if that’s what you’re into?”

“I said stop it!” says Eve, raising her voice and causing Villanelle to recoil slightly at the sudden outburst. “This isn’t a thing. I’m not leaving my husband for you just because we share marks. You’re hardly girlfriend material anyway. You’re a psychopath!”

Any semblance of being in a good mood that Villanelle has from finally being in the same room as Eve disappears from her body, trickling out as if Eve’s use of the word psychopath has pulled the plug out of a bathtub full of happy emotions. Villanelle has heard the word before, has been called that and so much more by everybody else in her life. Psychopath, crazy, monster - Villanelle has heard everything and it never affects her because she doesn’t care what other people think of her.

It hurts when Eve says it. Villanelle feels the word sting her, not in her chest like a knife to her heart, but in her abdomen, like Eve has taken a blade and sliced it through the flesh where Villanelle’s mark sits against her skin.

“That’s not a very nice thing to say to your soulmate, Eve.”

“You’re not my soulmate! You’re just somebody who happens to have my initials marked on them. Whatever big romance story you think this is, well it isn’t happening. We’re not having a happily ever after. I’ve already got that with Niko.”

“You’ll change your mind,” says Villanelle, certain that Eve will come to her senses soon. Destiny will prevail over whatever fear is holding Eve back.

“No, I won’t,” Eve says, shaking her head determinedly.

“Then that’s your loss,” says Villanelle, getting to her feet and standing next to the bed. “I’m amazing. I could have sex with anybody in this city if I wanted to.”

“Go on then,” says Eve, lifting her chin in a challenge, her eyes flitting briefly to the door and back again. “I’m not stopping you.”

If it was anybody else defying her, Villanelle would probably get angry and stab them, or if they were really pissing her off then she would strangle them with her bare hands, just to watch the life shrink from their eyes as she squeezes their windpipe with her strong fingers. 

Eve’s disinterest annoys Villanelle, but not to the point of murder. 

“Look at us, Eve,” she says in a soft voice, smiling instead of getting angry. “Our first fight.”

“You’re delusional.”

Delusional. Crazy. Monster.

_ Psychopath. _

Eve doesn’t mean it. Eve is just trying to hurt her because she doesn’t know how else to respond to this.

Time. That’s what Eve needs. Time to consider what her current life is lacking and what Villanelle could offer her. Time to realise that the connection they share is worth far more than a piece of paper and a pair of rings. Time to understand that there is a reason for this, a reason for the universe bringing them together.

Villanelle reaches into her trouser pocket and takes out a smartphone, which she places flat on the palm of her hand and offers it out to Eve.

“What’s that?” asks Eve. “Wait, is that  _ my _ phone?”

Villanelle watches in amusement as Eve scrambles about looking for her phone elsewhere, first checking the bedside table and then fumbling with the bedsheets to see if it has gotten lost somewhere under the covers. When she finds nothing -  _ obviously, _ because her phone is in Villanelle’s hand - she scowls at Villanelle, apparently frustrated that she hadn’t already noticed that it was missing when she woke up.

“Take it,” says Villanelle, taking a step closer with the phone held in her outstretched hand. “Call your boss.”

Eve eyes the phone warily, as if Villanelle could have tampered with it to make it explode in Eve’s hand, but she doesn’t take it.

“Call your boss and tell them that you’ve caught me.”

Eve still doesn’t take the phone. The frown on her face only seems to get more intense.

“I thought so.” Villanelle puts Eve’s phone down on the nightstand, within Eve’s arm’s reach, then takes a couple of steps backwards as she says, “Just in case you change your mind. You probably have a couple of hours before I’m out of the country.”

“Where are you going?” asks Eve.

Villanelle sinks her hands into the pockets of her trousers and strides towards the door of the hotel room.

“Home.”

“Where’s that? Russia?”

Villanelle digs her teeth into her lower lip to fight off a smile as she shakes her head, before she purrs, “Eve. Darling. Either you want to know me or you don’t. You can’t pick and choose.” 

Reaching for the door handle and pulling it open, Villanelle turns to Eve at the last moment.

“We’ll see each other again soon,” says Villanelle. “I am sure of it.”

And then she steps out into the corridor outside, closes the door, and leaves Eve Polastri behind.


	10. quite aesthetically pleasing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Killing Eve Week!

The hotel is in complete chaos.

Eve can only stand out in the hallway, barefoot against the plush carpeted floor, and watch through the open door of the room she should be fast asleep in as a small German forensics team gets to work.

Still slightly dazed from the experience of waking up to find an assassin standing over her bed, Eve can’t quite believe that it happened at all. It feels as if it were a dream - no, a terrible nightmare. After all, how could it possibly be real that a dangerous woman broke into her hotel room and then revealed the horrible, distasteful, _beautiful_ mark on her stomach?

Eve wanted to touch it. She still wants to touch it and wishes that she did when she had the chance, because who knows when, or even if, she will have that opportunity again. But touching it would have been giving the assassin what she wanted, and Eve’s stubbornness is simultaneously one of her best and worst qualities.

The worst part about the whole thing is that Eve now knows that the assassin believes in these marks, that she thinks there is some kind of romantic connection between them. Eve scoffs at the thought, even now. That’s not how love works. Attraction, perhaps, but not love.

The encounter with the assassin was … well, it was unlike anything that Eve could have possibly dreamed. Eve rarely dared to imagine what her first conversation with the woman would go like before last night, but she always assumed that it would play out more like a gritty television crime drama - with Eve on one side of an interrogation table and the assassin on the other, a naked bulb flickering above their heads as Eve skilfully plies answers out of her.

It was never supposed to be like this, in the middle of the night in a German hotel room, with Eve barely awake and still dressed in her pyjamas.

What kind of impression is that to give the woman who is, for all intents and purposes, Eve’s nemesis?

What kind of impression is it to give her soulmate?

Now that she has met the woman, Eve is even more confused than before about their connection. Though the assassin clearly believes that there should be something romantic between them, Eve struggles to think of a more ridiculous notion. They are complete polar opposites - one who is a murderer and one who is not, one who does believe in the marks and one who does not, one who is crazy and one who is not.

The most alarming realisation that has come from this meeting is that if Eve wasn’t married, she would probably consider it. The assassin is hot. Eve isn’t too stubborn to admit that, which means that objectively she can see the appeal. If she was single. And if the assassin wasn’t … well, an _assassin_. If she was just a normal person that Eve met at work, or in a yoga class, or somewhere else entirely _normal_ , Eve would probably be interested.

But would they even have the marks if things were different? Or would they just be two strangers who bumped into each other in a coffee shop once, before forgetting about the other entirely?

Eve certainly wouldn’t have ended up here, feeling a little as though she is the one responsible for an assassin drugging one MI6 agent and breaking into the hotel room of another.

As she watches the German authorities work through the open door to the hotel room, Eve wonders what they’re expecting to find. It had been Carolyn’s suggestion to bring them in, when Eve made the painful call to her shortly after the assassin left, though Eve doesn’t really see the point. They already have DNA on file from two of her previous kills, and Eve doesn’t need them to find a hair follicle or a few skin cells to test to confirm it as a match with the woman she met tonight.

But Carolyn doesn’t yet know about the personal connection between Eve and the assassin, and Eve would still rather keep that to herself for now.

Eve startles out of her own thoughts as her cell phone rings, and she delves a hand into the pocket of the hooded jacket she threw on over her pyjamas to find it.

Speak of the devil…

“Carolyn! Hi!”

Eve does her best to sound enthusiastic, or at least as enthusiastic as she can manage on such little sleep, because she still isn’t sure if she’s currently in Carolyn’s good or bad books.

“Any update?” asks Carolyn, who sounds remarkably chirpy considering the time difference means that it is not yet six o’clock in London.

“They’re still checking the room for DNA,” explains Eve, taking a couple of steps closer to the door so that she can peer inside and watch them work. “And the room next to mine too. Not the one Bill was in, the room on the other side. According to the front desk, somebody by the name of Monika made a last minute booking yesterday afternoon and specifically requested that room. She came into my room via the connected balconies.”

“Monika is an alias, I presume?” asks Carolyn.

“It’s the same name as the gallery employee who was on duty at the time of the murder but I don’t think it’s her real name. She sounded Russian.”

“A Russian assassin?” Carolyn hums thoughtfully. “How irritatingly clichéd.”

Eve opens her mouth to tell Carolyn that the assassin is also blonde and as beautiful as she is glamorous, but manages to stop herself just in time. It probably isn’t the best idea to allude to the assassin’s level of attractiveness, not when the assassin may very well be attracted to Eve too.

“And how is Bill?” Carolyn asks, causing Eve to sigh with relief at the change of subject that will stop her from saying anything stupid to her boss.

Eve glances further down the hallway, where Bill sits on a chair with a blood pressure cuff around his bicep while a paramedic shines a light into his eyes.

“Conscious.”

“Good. As soon as they give Bill the all clear to fly, I want you both on the first plane back to Heathrow. We can’t risk her coming after you again.”

Eve recalls what the assassin said just before she left and she knows that it is unlikely to be that easy to find her again.

“She’ll have left Munich by now,” Eve points out. “Perhaps even left Germany completely.”

Carolyn makes a little noise of agreement, then says, “I expect so too, but you can’t be too sure.”

Eve’s thoughts start to drift as she wonders what the assassin is up to right now, where she went, how she got there. Did she fly to a new city for her next job, some poor person whose mangled corpse will end up on Eve’s investigation board later in the week? Has she gone home, wherever that might be? Does she even have a home? Perhaps she doesn’t, maybe that’s what makes her so elusive. Maybe she lives the nomadic lifestyle, travelling from place to place with nothing but a suitcase full of designer clothes and concealed murder weapons, leaving a trail of bodies in her wake, always one step ahead of the authorities.

One step ahead of Eve.

Perhaps just half a step ahead now. With an arm trailing out behind her that Eve can almost, but not quite reach.

“Oh, and Eve?” Carolyn’s voice cuts through Eve’s thoughts. “I don’t suppose you know why she broke into your hotel room but didn’t actually harm you?”

Eve feels her cheeks start to flush pink and she is grateful that Carolyn isn’t actually here in person. There’s a slight accusatory tone just creeping in around the edges of Carolyn’s words, so subtle that Eve’s own guilt might just be imagining it, but it’s enough that it has her worrying that Carolyn knows there is more to this than Eve has told her so far.

Eve tries to imagine what Carolyn’s reaction would be if Eve suddenly dropped the _oh yeah, she’s my soulmate, by the way_ bomb. Perhaps not anger or even disappointment, but Eve is certain that there would definitely be some silent judgement.

There’s no way that she can admit the truth.

“I think she wanted to taunt me,” answers Eve, knowing that it is a variation on the truth, rather than an outright lie.

“To taunt you?”

“Yeah,” says Eve, closing her eyes as she talks into the phone and letting the assassin’s smirking face swim to the front of her mind. “She knows I’m getting close to her and wanted to rub it in my face that I haven’t caught her yet.”

“Very risky,” says Carolyn.

“She’s a psychopath,” Eve points out. “She doesn’t think about risk in the same way as you and I do. It’s about showing off. About playing a game and having the upper hand.”

“It’s not a game that I entirely approve of,” says Carolyn, and Eve can just picture the stern frown that is probably on her face right now. “You and Bill could have easily both lost your lives and quite frankly, I’m far too busy and important to be filling in the paperwork triggered by that kind of mishap.”

“She’s not going to kill any of us,” Eve insists, hoping that she isn’t going to come to regret making this assurance. “She needs us to play her game.”

“You seem to have a rather good understanding of the rules of this game,” Carolyn comments, and once again Eve is left feeling as though she is being judged for - of all things - being good at her job.

“Yeah, well that’s why you picked me for this job, right?”

Carolyn pauses thoughtfully, then agrees, “I suppose it is. Anyway, Eve, I’d better go. I’ve got to get ready for a breakfast meeting with an abominable man from the Foreign Office. Awful breath. Very eggy.”

“Charming,” says Eve.

“Let me know when you’re both back in London,” says Carolyn, before she abruptly hangs up without so much as a goodbye.

Tucking her phone back into her pocket, Eve wanders down the hallway and stops next to Bill, who thanks the paramedic in German, then pulls a face at Eve as the paramedic removes the blood pressure cuff and walks away.

“You okay?” Eve asks him.

“Just fantastic,” Bill answers, in a voice that is flat and contradicts his words. He leans forward to peer around Eve at where the investigators are still bustling in and out of Eve’s room, then says, “Isn’t this all a bit much? I just want to go back to bed.”

“Carolyn’s orders,” explains Eve. Recalling her recent conversation, she adds, “Speaking of - you’ll have to wait to sleep on the plane. She wants us on the next flight back to London.”

“MI6 really knows how to treat its employees,” Bill comments dryly, arching an eyebrow at Eve. “Drugged by a serial killer and I’m still expected back in the office by lunchtime.”

“Just be grateful that she kept you alive,” Eve points out, not even wanting to imagine how different things might be right now if the assassin had decided to use a slightly more permanent means to incapacitate Bill so that she could have some one-on-one time with Eve.

Bill considers this for a few seconds, then nods, before a slow smile spreads across his face. He nudges Eve’s hip playfully with his hand, before he wiggles his eyebrows at her and asks, “So?”

Eve stares blankly back at Bill, confused about what he is asking.

“So what?”

“So, what’s she like?”

Oh. Eve feels a blush start to rise up her neck as she remembers the encounter that feels like it took place in a different lifetime, not three short hours ago. How can she even begin to describe such an experience? How can she begin to describe such a _person_?

“Young, blonde hair, pretty eyes,” says Eve, deciding that the physical aspects of the assassin are probably the easiest to start with, because she doesn’t yet know if there are even the words to describe the conflicting array of emotions that the other woman has made her feel in such a short space of time. “The kind of eyes you could get lost in and only realise how dangerous she is when you’re about to drown. She had an accent - Russian, I think, but maybe from somewhere else in Eastern Europe. She was very well dressed. Expensive-looking clothes, fashionable, not your usual get-up for breaking in somewhere. And god, she smelt _amazing_.”

Bill grins at her.

“Have you got a thing for her?” he teases her, wiggling his eyebrows at her suggestively.

“Of course I don’t have a thing for her!” Eve denies, outraged that Bill could have the audacity to even suggest such a thing. “Not like that. I mean, yes, she’s quite aesthetically pleasing, but she’s also completely insane.”

“In what way?”

Eve shoots Bill a look as if to say _seriously?_

“You mean aside from the fact that she roofied your drink and broke into my hotel room?”

Bill hums in concession and says, “Point taken.”

Eve hesitates for a few seconds, wondering how much detail she should go into about the marks, because she can tell that it’s what Bill is really curious about. Part of Eve wants to stay silent on the subject, knowing that the more she tells him, the more ammunition he has to use against her the next time he wants to have a bit of a laugh at Eve’s expense. But Eve also realises that she has an opportunity here if she tells the truth, an opportunity to paint the assassin as the crazy one and herself as the rational person who turned down a proposition from her soulmate because she loves her husband instead.

“She showed me her mark, Bill,” admits Eve. “And then she forced me to show her mine. She believes in them. I think she thought that she would just turn up and we would be together. Like, _girlfriends_ together.”

“And what was your reaction to that?”

“I said it couldn’t happen, obviously. I told her that I was already married.”

Bill pauses, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully.

“Let me get this straight - you told an unhinged psychopath that the only thing standing between her and her soulmate is Niko?”

It takes Eve a moment to realise exactly what Bill is implying, and her thoughts immediately rush to think of Niko. Poor, innocent Niko, fast asleep in the bed he normally shares with Eve, who could wake up to find an assassin standing over him too, except that instead of wanting to talk, she wants to kill him.

“Oh god!” exclaims Eve, her eyes going wild as she realises that a few thoughtless words to a very dangerous woman may have accidentally put her husband’s life in danger. “You don’t think she’ll go after him, do you?”

Bill simply shrugs.

“I don’t know. You’re the one who knows her.”

“I hardly know her,” Eve points out. She runs an exasperated hand through her hair and then groans, “Oh god. What have I done? Maybe I should have agreed to whatever it is she wants from me. Maybe it would be safer for all of us if I just give her what she wants.”

“You mean you?”

“I don’t know anymore,” sighs Eve, pacing up and down before she stops next to an empty stretch of wall and leans her forehead against the painted plaster. “Maybe. Maybe I just need to - _you know_ \- with her once and then she’ll leave me alone. Leave _us_ alone.”

“You’re not seriously considering shagging a psychopath just to get rid of her, are you?”

It is only when Bill asks the question aloud that Eve realises what a ridiculous plan that would be. And who is to say that the psychopath would be satisfied with just once? What if she really does want it all - the hearts and the flowers and the romance and everything else that Eve is unable to give to her?

“No,” Eve answers. “You’re right. And we don’t want to get rid of her anyway, we want to catch her.” Eve turns around to look at Bill again as the cogs in her mind start slotting into place against each other and turning to form new plans. “But maybe we can use this to help catch her. We know that this is her weakness - that _I’m_ her weakness - why can’t we capitalise on that to bring her to justice?”

“You mean you want to set an assassin trap using yourself as the bait?” asks Bill, arching a sceptical eyebrow at Eve.

“Don’t give me that look,” Eve warns Bill, shaking her head at him. “You know it makes sense. She’s not going to hurt me. I’m, like, ninety-nine percent sure of that, so all I have to do is get her to trust me and then we’ll have her.”

“I think I preferred the sex plan.”

“Of course you would,” Eve says, rolling her eyes. “You dirty pervert.” She sighs, then takes out her phone again and scrolls through her contacts, before saying to Bill, “I should call Niko. You know, to warn him to watch out for psychopaths that may want him dead.”

“Good luck!”

Eve taps the screen and lifts the phone to her ear, taking a few paces down the hallway towards the lift for some privacy as she listens to it ring. It doesn’t take long for Niko to pick up, much to Eve’s relief, but he answers with a disgruntled huff.

“You’d better have a bloody good reason for calling me at this ridiculous hour.”

Eve grimaces to herself as she realises that England is an hour behind. She pictures Niko being woken up by her call, shaggy hair tousled and sticking out in all directions, his mouth pressed into a frown beneath the bristles of his mustache.

“Sorry, I forgot about the time difference. It’s so good to hear your voice. I missed you, that’s all.”

“That’s why you’re calling me at five thirty in the morning?” asks Niko, and Eve winces again as she realises that maybe it was a bit of an overreaction to call him at all.

“And to let you know that there’s been a change of plan and that I’ll be flying home today.”

Niko is silent for a few seconds, before he asks, “Is everything okay?”

“Of course!” insists Eve. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You’re only an hour ahead and you’re not normally a morning person.”

“Yeah, well…” Eve can hardly tell tell him that her sleep was rudely interrupted in the early hours by the unexpected appearance of her soulmate. That kind of news can’t be conveyed over the phone, if Eve should even share it with him at all. “I didn’t sleep well. Unfamiliar bed, you know? And I missed you.”

Niko hums softly, then says, “I know, you already said.”

Guilt settles in the pit of Eve’s stomach, as if the assassin showing up in the middle of the night for a conversation is tantamount to cheating on Niko. It’s not, but it feels like Eve should be apologising for something, like she has betrayed him by not doing more to get rid of the assassin sooner.

“Do you want to go out tonight?” Eve asks Niko, as the guilt gnaws away at her insides. “It’s been ages since we had a date night. We could get dinner, I could wear that dress you really like…”

“I can’t tonight,” Niko interjects. “I have plans.”

“Oh?”

“We have a training day at school today,” Niko explains. “No kids. So it’s basically just an excuse for us to knock off early and go to the pub. But there’s some leftover bolognese in a container in the fridge that you can help yourself to for dinner.”

Eve wrinkles her nose up at the thought of one of Niko’s teacher gatherings, glad that he can’t actually see her. From previous experience, Eve knows that teachers can be dull as hell. Not that Niko is dull - Eve loves him dearly and no issue with his profession - but she’s been to enough of his staff drinks and Christmas parties to know that being in a room with more than one teacher at a time is a recipe for confirmed boredom. They complain about their workloads and problem students and Ofsted inspections and it’s very hard for a non-teacher like Eve to participate in the conversation at all, especially when she has no interest in any of the above. In their early years of marriage, Eve attended everything like the diligent wife she was, until Niko offered her a reprieve and said that her attendance, while appreciated, was never mandatory.

In fact, Eve is quite relieved at the prospect of an evening alone in her study while Niko drinks beer and competes with his colleagues over who has to teach the naughtiest class on a Friday afternoon.

Except…

Except that _Gemma_ might be there. And Eve doesn’t like the idea of Niko spending an evening talking and laughing with her over a few drinks.

She would rather listen to the boring tales of classroom misdemeanours than sit at home on her own, knowing that Niko is spending Friday night with his soulmate rather than Eve.

“Can I come?” she asks, teeth digging into her lower lip as she waits for Niko’s answer.

Predictably, he sounds surprised.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” says Eve, before she elaborates, “I feel bad that I had to go away on a last minute work trip and it’s been ages since I saw your colleagues. Unless I’d be cramping your style if I showed up?”

“Nonsense,” Niko says, his tone warm and reassuring. “You could never cramp my style. Of course you can come. I’ll text you when I know which pub but it’ll probably be The Swan.”

“I’ll meet you there after work then,” Eve tells him.

“Looking forward to it,” says Niko.

The poor man probably means it, too.

“Oh, and Niko?”

“Yes?”

“Be careful.”

“Be careful?” Niko parrots back, laughing to himself as if Eve’s well wishes are insane. “It’s just a training day. With a bit of first aid, then a safeguarding refresher, I think the worst that will happen is extreme boredom.”

“I know. But London is a dangerous place. So just watch out that you don’t get mugged getting off the tube, or swept up in a crowd of tourists visiting the Dungeons on your way to work, or something.”

Eve can hear the amusement creeping in around the edges of Niko’s voice as he replies, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Okay. Awesome.”

“I love you,” says Niko. He pauses, then adds, “Please never wake me up this early again.”

“I won’t! See you later!”

“Bye, Eve.”

Eve hangs up, feeling marginally better now that she’s spoken to Niko. He is perhaps the only thing still tethering Eve to normality. Without him, who knows which dangerous place Eve would find herself floating away to.

“He’s not dead then?” asks Bill, arching an eyebrow as Eve wanders back towards him.

“Not yet,” answers Eve, shaking her head, before she adds dramatically, “I might die tonight though.” When Bill’s eyes widen in horror, Eve is quick to explain, “Of boredom. I agreed to go to one of Niko’s work drinks things.”

“But you hate those,” Bill points out, having heard Eve complain about Niko’s dull colleagues many times before. “Wait, is that because you’re feeling guilty about what happened here?”

“Absolutely not,” insists Eve. She hesitates, then admits, “It’s because _his_ soulmate might be there.”

“Ah, I see,” says Bill, raising his eyebrows knowingly. “Checking out the competition.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Eve scolds him. “I’m just curious, that’s all.”

“Curious,” repeats Bill. “Got it. I bet that your assassin was curious too, right before she broke into your hotel room.”

“Stop it,” Eve warns him. “I’m nothing like her.”

“Of course you’re not.”

Eve narrows her eyes at Bill. His deadpan expression is difficult to read. Eve can’t tell if he believes her or if he’s mocking her.

“We need to get back to London,” says Eve, eager to change the subject before Bill gets the opportunity to delve into Eve’s relationship with the assassin again. “I think…” Eve trails off and closes her eyes for a few seconds, considering her next words before she says them aloud. “I think I need to tell Carolyn about the marks.”

“No more secrets then?” Bill asks.

“Nope. No secrets.”

Eve sends a hand into the pocket of her hoodie and lets her fingers close around the cold handle of the switchblade that the assassin forgot to pick up off the dresser when she made her hasty exit earlier. Eve doesn’t feel guilty about stashing it in her pocket before the investigators arrived.

It’s a souvenir, Eve tells herself. Not a secret.


	11. sabotaging

London is exactly as they left it two days ago - wet and bleak. Eve feels thoroughly uninspired by everything as soon as she steps out of the airport and feels the drizzle hit her face, internally cursing the fact that her umbrella is currently buried somewhere amongst the balled up clothes in her suitcase, meaning that her hair must pay the consequences.

Bill, despite having spent the entire two hour flight snoring next to Eve’s ear, tells her that he’s taking the afternoon off to go home and sleep off the lingering drowsiness from the drugs the assassin slipped him last night, leaving Eve with a few choice words to pass onto Carolyn if his absence is questioned. Needless to say, Eve doesn’t think she can repeat much of his message without getting one or both of them fired for gross misconduct.

The office is exactly the same too. Eve drags her suitcase along hallway after identical hallway, wondering why it all feels so normal. Did MI6 not get the memo? Do they not know that she survived an encounter with a dangerous assassin? Eve knows that it’s ridiculous to expect a welcome party to congratulate her on still being alive, but it’s jarring to have gone through so much, to feel as though something has changed within her while the rest of the world remains the same.

Until she gets to her team’s office, that is. With the two most senior members of the team away, Eve would expect at least a little bit of slacking from Elena and Kenny but they are both hard at work when she steps into the room. _Suspiciously_ hard at work.

“Eve!” says Elena, looking up from her computer as soon as she hears Eve’s footsteps in the doorway. “You’re back!”

Kenny looks up too and greets Eve with a polite nod of his head, then turns his attention back to whatever is occupying him on his computer screen.

“Where’s Bill?” asks Elena.

“Long story,” Eve says with a sigh, hauling her suitcase into the corner of the office behind her desk, then shrugging her coat off her weary shoulders. “We’ve got a lot to fill you in on.”

“I’ve got a lot to tell you too,” says Elena. Her eyes go wide with the promise of something juicy, before her gaze darts across to where Kenny sits. “Uh, Kenny? Don’t you normally take your lunch at this time?”

Kenny frowns at the time in the bottom corner of his screen, then looks up at them both with a confused frown on his face as he answers, “It’s barely gone twelve. I like to eat a little later.”

“I think you should take your lunch now,” suggests Elena, giving him a particular look that Eve doesn’t quite understand. Kenny doesn’t seem to understand it either, until Elena adds, “Eve and I need a girly catch-up.”

Kenny scrambles to push his chair back. There’s a flush to his cheeks that Eve doesn’t recognise, but he is remarkably obedient to Elena’s command. He picks up his jacket and slips his arms into the sleeves, then makes a hasty exit, his trainers squeaking against the polished floor as he walks away.

“What’s up with him?” Eve asks Elena, as soon as Kenny has disappeared from the room.

“That’s what we need to talk about,” says Elena. Her teeth dig into her lower lip and she shoots Eve a grimace, before she confesses, “I might have accidentally shagged Kenny.”

“Okay…” Eve nods slowly as she takes in this new piece of information, not entirely surprised by the fact that it took Elena less than two days of being left alone in the office with Kenny to pounce on him and do the deed, even after swearing to Eve that it would never happen. “And when you say that you _might have accidentally…”_

“I did,” Elena says, confirming with a nod and the tiniest trace of guilt on her face. “I slept with Kenny.”

Eve only has a moment to contemplate the potential HR disaster, before she remembers something from a previous conversation with Kenny and asks, “Wait, doesn’t he have a girlfriend?”

“Had,” answers Elena. “They broke up, apparently. Which is why even though I _did_ have sex with my soulmate, it doesn’t actually mean anything because I was just a rebound. Although I wouldn’t be entirely opposed to…”

“Elena,” interrupts Eve, her own soulmate drama rushing through her mind like a hurricane that could destroy everything she knows. “I would love to stay and talk, but I’ve got a meeting with Carolyn. I met the assassin and I think…”

“Hold up,” Elena says, her eyes almost bulging out of their sockets in surprise. “You _met_ the assassin? You’ve been letting me yap on about my sex life - he’s surprisingly athletic, by the way - when you’ve _met_ the assassin? Why didn’t you lead with that?”

Eve wrinkles her nose as Elena already gives far too much detail about the sex she had with Kenny. He’s barely stepped out of childhood in Eve’s eyes, too young to even grow more than a bit of patchy stubble on his chin and _definitely_ too young to be defiled by Elena.

“I don’t know. It didn’t seem like that big of a deal.”

Elena’s face contorts into an expression of complete incredulity and though she opens her mouth to respond, Eve cuts her off before she can say a word.

“I’ll tell you all about her later,” Eve promises. She thinks about what is waiting for her upstairs in Carolyn’s office, then adds as an afterthought, “If I survive Carolyn.”

“Good luck!”

Carolyn’s office is only two floors up, a walk which takes Eve a minute and a half at most, but she spends the entire somber journey feeling as though she is walking to the gallows to accept her fate. She can’t imagine that Carolyn will have anything good to say about two of her employees coming so close to serious harm while pursuing a lead, and with Bill presumably in a blissful state of deep sleep back at his house, Eve will have to face the brunt of Carolyn’s reaction, whatever it may be, alone.

The door is slightly open when Eve reaches the office but she doesn’t know if that’s an invitation. Carolyn is visible through the gap, but hard at work, an expensive looking fountain pen poised in one hand as she reads through a document laid out on her desk.

“Well?” Carolyn asks, putting down her pen and looking up with a frown on her face that makes Eve feel as though her presence is completely unwelcome.

“You wanted to see me when I got back to London?” Eve reminds her.

“So why are you hovering at my door then? I don’t have the time to wait for you to decide whether or not you’re going to come in.”

Eve feels her cheeks start to burn as she enters the office and closes the door behind her, before she crosses over to the desk and perches on the edge of the chair opposite Carolyn.

“Before you say anything,” Eve starts, eager to get the first word in before Carolyn can even think about commenting on what happened in Munich, “I don’t think you should take me off the case.”

Carolyn stares at Eve over the rim of the glasses perched on her nose with a look of incredulity that wouldn’t be unwarranted if Eve suddenly sprouted a second head.

“Why on earth would I take you off the case?”

“Because…” Eve almost loses herself in Carolyn’s confusion, wondering if maybe she imagined the entire encounter with the assassin in her state of sleep deprivation. “I thought that maybe you wouldn’t be happy knowing that she knows who Bill and I are.” Eve pauses for a second, scanning Carolyn’s face for any indication of what is going through her mind, before she adds, “But she’s not going to kill me. I’m sure of it.”

“She’s a psychopath, Eve. How can you possibly be sure of that?”

Eve can’t truly be sure, Carolyn is right about that. Eve takes herself back in her mind to the early hours of this morning, to the pure terror that gripped her entire body when she woke up to find the assassin standing over her. The same terror that still lurks within her chest. Eve can’t be sure that the assassin won’t kill her, but her instinct tells her that she is safe. For now, at least. Eve saw the look in the assassin’s eyes when revealed the ‘V’ on her stomach and knows that she would have to be one hell of an actress to fake that. 

Eve felt it too, that magnetism, that undeniable connection. It’s not something that she can explain, not something that she wants to even have to acknowledge, but she knows it was there. Even now, Eve feels the lure of her soulmate. Her mind is consumed by the thought of her, almost longing for the chance to see her again, even though their last encounter took place less than twelve hours ago. They are bonded by more than just their marks, more than just the chase.

Eve has to trust that the assassin feels that too.

And for the sake of her livelihood, Eve needs Carolyn to be on board with that trust too.

“There’s something else that I think you should know,” Eve begins. “Something I didn’t tell you on the phone this morning.” Eve hesitates for a few seconds, before deciding to lie to Carolyn as she adds, “Something I only found out when she broke into my hotel room.”

“Spit it out,” Carolyn orders her.

“She’s my soulmate,” confesses Eve. “And I’m hers. That’s how I know she’s not going to kill me. She believes in the marks. She thinks we can be together?”

“And do you?” Carolyn asks. Her expression is unreadable, hiding any emotions that may lurk beneath the surface. “Think you can be together?”

“Of course not,” Eve is quick to answer, because she could never see herself being with somebody who kills for a living, soulmate or not.

Carolyn lets out a sigh, then says, “In my experience, these kinds of marks tend to be quite a lot more trouble than they’re worth. Particularly when one party gets more attached than the other. This does rather complicate things, Eve.”

“I know,” Eve agrees, becoming more determined to prove her worth to continue leading this team with each second that passes. “But the only reason I have her mark is because I’m supposed to be the one hunting her. Nobody else can do it. And she’s going to come back for me. As long as she still believes in the marks, we have a chance to catch her.”

Eve watches as Carolyn considers this and can only hope that she’s done enough to convince Carolyn that this is still worth pursuing. Eve knows that the assassin will come back for her - her parting words, the promise that they would see each other again soon, still echo in Eve’s ears.

“And you’re absolutely certain that she’s not going to kill you?” Carolyn asks.

“Positive,” Eve confirms, with a quick nod. “She could have killed me last night if that’s what she wanted to do.”

Carolyn presses her lips together and frowns over the rim of her glasses, then says, “I don’t like this, but I’ll see what we can do about surveillance. And in the meantime, if she makes contact again, we need to know immediately.”

“Absolutely,” Eve assures Carolyn. “You have my word.”

* * *

When Eve returns to the office downstairs, Kenny is still gone. Elena gets up from her chair as soon as Eve enters, with an expression on her face like an excitable puppy who has been staring at the door waiting for their master to come home. She grabs her coat from the back of her chair on her way over to Eve, spinning Eve around a full one hundred and eighty degrees until she’s facing the door again.

“Let’s go for lunch,” Elena says, looping her arm through Eve’s and guiding her towards the door. “I think I might explode if I don’t talk to somebody about Kenny soon. And you’ve got to tell me all about your assassin too.”

“She’s not _my_ assassin,” Eve mumbles under her breath. She glances out of the window at the miserable grey clouds outside, then says, “Wait. Let me grab my umbrella. I’m going out with Niko tonight and I won’t have time to wash my hair after work so I don’t want to let it get frizzy.”

Eve ducks past Elena and crosses over to her suitcase, which she hoists up onto her desk and fumbles with the faulty zip until she manages to tug it open. Everything is a mess inside, her clothes bundled haphazardly in her haste to pack this morning instead of being folded neatly, but Eve delves both hands into the mess and rummages around for the umbrella she knows is concealed somewhere within.

The fingers of her right hand close around something hard and Eve knows it isn’t an umbrella, but she can’t figure out what it actually is based on touch alone, which is why she pulls it out from beneath the clothes and turns it over in her hands to examine it.

It’s a small bottle of perfume, an unmarked sample size filled with clear liquid. Eve doesn’t recognise it - she’s used the same brand of perfume for the last ten years, with such regularity that even Niko knows exactly which scent she uses so that he can buy her a new bottle for Christmas each year. This bottle doesn’t belong to Eve, but nor can she explain why it would be in her suitcase.

“What is it?” Elena asks, wandering over to Eve’s desk and peering past the lid of her suitcase to see what Eve is frowning at.

“What the-?” Eve starts, desperately trying to figure out how it can have ended up in her suitcase. Is it Niko’s, perhaps? Or Bill’s? Or-

There’s only one other person who could have had access to Eve’s suitcase. And though Eve watched her leave the hotel room, she has no idea how long the assassin was in there before Eve woke up. No idea what she got up to in that time.

“Give it here,” says Elena, snatching the bottle from Eve’s hands and flicking off the cap. “Let me smell it.”

“Stop!” Eve manages to yell out, just as Elena poised her finger over the nozzle ready to spritz some of the perfume onto her wrist. 

“What?”

Eve lunges forward and plucks the perfume from Elena’s hand, clicking the lid back into place and then putting it down on the desk out of reach of them both.

“It belongs to the killer,” Eve explains, watching the perfume with wide eyes as if expecting it to suddenly explode and take half the office down with it. “She left it in my case.”

Elena frowns at the bottle for a few seconds, before her face cracks open into a grin.

“How romantic,” Elena says to Eve, playfully leaning in to nudge her arm against Eve’s.

“It’s not romantic,” Eve replies, rolling her eyes. “We don’t know what’s in it. We should get it to a lab. Get it tested.”

“Wait, you think it could be poisoned?” asks Elena, the grin slipping from her face as she wipes the palms of her hands against the material of her patterned skirt.

Eve shrugs, then answers truthfully, despite her earlier assurance to Carolyn that the assassin would never harm her, “I can’t be a hundred percent sure that it isn’t. Besides, it could tell us more about our woman.”

“Your woman, you mean? Please, Eve, tell me all about her. I want to know _everything.”_

Eve reaches back into her suitcase and finds the umbrella she was looking for in the first place, then tosses the bottle of perfume back in amongst the clothes for safekeeping until she can deal with it after she’s eaten lunch.

“Fine. Ask away.”

“Is she hot?” Elena asks straight away, eyes widening in anticipation of the answer.

Eve pauses for a beat, then remembers that there is no point denying it when she has already told Bill, who is one of the worst offenders when it comes to workplace gossip, as much this morning.

“She’s _gorgeous,_ Elena.”

* * *

Eve almost forgets that she agreed to join Niko and his colleagues for a drink after work. It’s only when she checks her phone mid-afternoon and finds a text from him telling her that his training day has already finished and confirming the location of the pub that she remembers, slumping back in her seat with a sigh. It seemed like such a good idea at the time, an opportunity to scope out her competition and mark her territory with Niko in front of his soulmate right on the back of meeting her own, but now Eve is faced with the prospect of an evening pretending to be interested in boring teacher problems when she would really much rather go home for an early night to make up for the sleep she didn’t get last night when the assassin broke into her room and kept her awake.

She _nearly_ considers bailing. The bitch is welcome to Niko, Eve thinks to herself as she gets onto a crowded tube carriage with her suitcase in tow to go home and change before meeting Niko. Gemma can have him, as long as Eve can get some uninterrupted sleep.

No.

Eve shakes her head to snap herself out of that train of thought. Her marriage is pretty much the only thing keeping Eve tethered to normality. Not showing up after insisting to Niko that she would be there is worse than never having been invited in the first place. Eve has committed to going, so she will go.

Perhaps if she changes into a really sexy dress, she’ll only have to listen to Niko’s dull colleagues for a little bit before she can convince Niko that she can offer him something more enjoyable at home.

Eve arrives at the pub and finds Niko’s group easily, recognising a few of his colleagues at the bar before she spots his shaggy head at a nearby table with a few others.

“Hi, sorry I’m late,” Eve says, announcing her arrival.

“Eve!” says Niko, his eyes widening in surprise, as if he had forgotten that Eve promised to meet him here. “Hi!”

The woman sitting beside Niko stiffens slightly when he says Eve’s name, withdrawing her hand from where it had been placed on the table next to Niko’s forearm, like a teenager on their first ever date trying to pluck up the courage to hold hands for the first time.

So _this_ must be Gemma.

“How are you?” Niko continues, getting to his feet so that he can press a bristly kiss to Eve’s mouth. “Take a seat while I get you a drink. I think you know most of this lot.”

As Niko steps past her with his wallet out to go to the bar, Eve removes her coat and sits down in his newly vacated seat. She greets the faces that she recognises with warm smiles and muted hellos, then turns to address Probably Gemma with a forced smile on her face.

“I don’t think we’ve met before,” she says, offering out her hand. “I’m Eve, Niko’s wife.”

The woman takes Eve’s hand and shakes it meekly, before replying, “I’m Gemma. It’s so nice to meet you. Niko talks about you all the time.”

“Oh really?” asks Eve, continuing to shake Gemma’s hand far longer than is normal, applying just enough pressure to her fingers to let Gemma know that Eve could crush her, if necessary.

Eve finds it more interesting that Niko is apparently talking to Gemma ‘all the time’ than the fact he could be talking about Eve, because it contradicts the impression he has given Eve that his interactions with Gemma are fleeting and purely out of politeness.

Eve releases Gemma’s hand and cautiously eyes her up and down, appraising the woman who is supposedly her husband’s soulmate. She thinks of what she knows of Niko and tries, against her better judgement, to pair him with Gemma in her head.

Gemma is younger than Eve, with the bright eyes of somebody who has not yet crested forty. In fact, she almost reminds Eve of a grown up child, wearing a floral dress and bright purple tights that disappear into her ankle boots. Her long hair is somewhere between a deep chocolate brown colour and dark red, kept out of her face by a pair of hair grips. Around her neck hangs a pendant in the shape of a cat - that in itself has Eve’s eyes rolling back into her head because of _course_ Gemma is an animal person, just like Niko - which falls low into the V-shaped neckline of Gemma’s dress and _yes,_ okay, those are her boobs.

Okay, so that’s another point to Gemma.

Eve looks away, glancing over towards the bar to check up on Niko, before she can’t help herself and looks back at Gemma again. Specifically, she looks back at Gemma’s breasts, because _wow._ Niko would have to be an idiot not to have thought about those.

_Not helpful,_ Eve scolds herself, forcing herself to look in the other direction.

Niko returns from the bar, setting down a large glass of red wine for Eve and a pint of Guinness for himself, then pulls over an empty chair from another table so that he can sit down.

“How was your trip?” he asks, sipping at the frothy head on his Guinness.

“Pretty uneventful,” Eve lies.

“What do you do for work, Eve?” interjects Gemma.

Eve shoots Gemma a forced smile, before she answers elusively, “If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.”

Gemma’s eyes widen in surprise for a few seconds, before she lets out a shrill laugh.

“You are so funny, Eve!” Gemma says, reaching out to lay her hand on Eve’s arm.

Eve’s eyes flicker uncomfortably between Gemma’s face and the hand on her arm, before she says, “I’m being completely serious.”

“Oh,” says Gemma, the smile falling from her face as she withdraws her hand, before she lets her eyes wander past Eve to Niko, as if seeking some kind of heroic intervention from him.

“Eve works for the government,” Niko explains.

“It’s not as interesting as it sounds,” Eve interjects, though she has no doubt that being woken up by an enigmatic assassin is wildly more interesting than trying to get inner-city teenagers to engage with _Romeo and Juliet._ “I’m mostly just drowning in paperwork.”

“Oh, tell me about it,” Gemma says, nodding fervently in agreement. “I feel like us teachers spend more time ticking boxes than we do actually teaching! I’m sure you must have heard Niko complain about the new dynamic marking system the headteacher has got us trialling with Year Seven?”

Eve takes a sip of her wine, then replies, “No, I don’t think he’s mentioned it.”

“Oh. Well it’s a nightmare. So time consuming, right Niko?”

The way that Gemma says his name, like _Nee_ -ko, is really starting to grate on Eve.

“Total ballache,” agrees Niko.

One Eve’s left, Gemma leans slightly closer and Eve worries for a second that she’s going to get all touchy-feely again, but instead she just asks, “Can I be honest with you, Eve? Girl to girl?”

Eve’s heart picks up its pace in her chest. Is this the moment that Gemma confesses she has feelings for Niko? Is this where she reveals that her true intentions are to lead Niko astray?

Oh god, what if they’re already having an affair?

“Of course,” Eve says, though the prospect of what Gemma’s honesty could entail actually leaves Eve with a dry mouth and fills her with anxiety.

“I think you’re so lucky to have Niko,” confesses Gemma. “He just doesn’t stop talking about you at work.”

“He doesn’t?”

“It’s always Eve this and Eve that. I think quite a few of us ladies are a bit jealous of what you two have.”

Eve turns her head to frown at Niko, because what Gemma is telling her doesn’t sound like Niko at all. He is the kind of man who shows his affection through gestures rather than words, the kind of man who diligently buys her flowers every birthday and Valentine’s Day, who cooks hearty meals and folds the laundry when Eve is too tired after work to do it herself. He isn’t one for sappy words or romantic declarations of love.

And yet apparently he gushes to his colleagues about Eve?

Eve thinks of her own colleagues, particularly Elena and Kenny, who have never actually met Niko, and wonders what kind of impression they have of him. She talks about him a fair amount at work, especially since the marks appeared, but she probably complains about him more than she praises him.

With Gemma watching, Eve decides to smile and lays her hand on his thigh, squeezing his leg through his jeans as she says, “I guess I am lucky.”

* * *

Eve can’t figure out how she feels about Gemma.

It’s not that Gemma is a vile person - in fact, quite the opposite, she is perfectly lovely – it’s that she’s not a very Eve person. The smiles and the constant chatter and the bubbly laughter is a _lot._ It would be a lot in any circumstances but this evening when Eve is running on virtually no sleep from the night before, it’s draining.

And, to be quite frank, even though the only reason Eve came here tonight was to scope out Gemma, it is not Gemma who is at the front of her mind.

Mesmerising hazel eyes and that infuriating smirk are all that Eve finds herself thinking of. 

Eve wonders what the assassin is doing right now. Could she be preparing for her next job already, another body for Eve and her team to pin to their board and stare cluelessly at? Or has she taken the night off? A relaxing night in perhaps, or maybe she’s out with friends of her own, drinking and laughing and telling them about her soulmate. Does she have friends at all? Can somebody filled with so much darkness even make the connections needed for friendship?

Eve wishes more than anything that the assassin hadn’t broken into room in the early hours of this morning for a conversation. Sure, it’s probably a good thing that Eve has met her properly, because now she has an actual face to go with the growing pile of extravagant murders, but it has also humanised the monster behind those bodies. As much as Eve tries to concentrate on the assassin’s actions, on slit throats and sharpened chopsticks through the heart, all she can think about is the woman herself, the beautiful, impeccably-dressed, charming woman who has Eve’s initials on her remarkably toned abdomen.

“Do you want another drink before we go home?”

Niko’s hand on Eve’s thigh startles her back to reality and she has to pretend that she hasn’t just been zoned out for the last however many minutes, nodding and pretending to listen as he and Gemma talk over her, discussing school and some of the children they both teach.

“Sure,” says Eve, not thrilled at the prospect of staying here even longer but relieved to at least have a time frame and to know that she can go home to bed after just one more drink. And, with the prospect of being left alone with an exhausting Gemma while Niko buys the drinks, Eve adds, “Let me come with you to the bar.”

“Do you want another drink, Gemma?” Niko asks, as he and Eve both get to their feet.

“No thank you,” Gemma replies in her sickly sweet voice. She gestures to her current drink, still half-full, then adds, “I’ve nearly reached my limit. But thanks for offering.”

Eve follows Niko over to the bar, glad to have a moment of respite away from Gemma. She clutches her bag in front of her body as she waits for one of the staff behind the bar to notice their order.

“Are you okay?” Niko asks.

One of his arms winds around behind Eve’s back and pulls her body into his side, giving her waist a little squeeze. It’s probably supposed to be reassuring, but with the knowledge that Niko is not normally a touchy-feely kind of person in public, it actually has the opposite effect.

Is he doing it for Gemma’s benefit? And if so, why would he need to prove to Gemma that his marriage to Eve is a solid one if he hadn’t already given Gemma the opposite impression?

“Gemma seems nice,” Eve says, not brushing off Niko’s touch, but not particularly leaning into him either.

“She is,” Niko answers, almost disinterestedly.

“Her tits are enormous,” says Eve, turning to look over her shoulder at Gemma, letting her eyes fall to the cleavage on display at the neckline of her dress. “Much bigger than mine.”

“Are they? I hadn’t noticed.”

There is no way that Niko can’t have noticed.

Gemma must be wearing a push-up bra, or perhaps she just has miracle boobs that defy gravity, because they look incredible. Eve can’t imagine that she gets away with dressing like this in front of the kids on a normal school day and wonders if she has dressed up specifically for the training day.

Specifically to impress other members of staff.

Niko _has_ to have noticed. Eve is pretty sure that if a priest who had taken a vow of chastity walked into this very pub, they would immediately notice Gemma’s tits without needing them to be signposted.

“You hadn’t?” Eve challenges Niko. “I’m not stopping you from looking at them.”

Eve knows that Niko is lying. Since the encounter with her own soulmate last night, she knows what it’s like. She understands the temptation, understands that he must have spent the last few weeks playing a game of ‘what if’ in his mind. What if Eve wasn’t in the picture? What if Gemma showed an interest? What if the situation was different? He must have wondered what it would be like to be with Gemma instead, must have wondered what it is about Gemma in particular that has earned the right to have her initials marked on his body? He would have to be a hero, a saint, not to have considered the possibilities.

Eve won’t even be mad if he admits to looking. She just wants Niko to acknowledge that Gemma is a temptation, because hearing that will make Eve feel so much better about being the one who gets to go home with him.

“Eve, I know what you’re trying to do.”

“And what’s that?” Eve asks, feigning innocence.

“I can’t win,” Niko says, as he waves a hand to catch the attention of a bartender to order new drinks. “If I admit that I’ve looked, you’ll get mad at me for looking. And if I say that I haven’t, you’ll get mad at me for lying.”

Niko turns and places his order, and Eve waits until the bartender has turned around to prepare their drinks before asking her next question.

“So you _have_ looked?”

“Eve,” Niko warns her, shaking his head. “We’re not doing this here. Gemma is a friend. That’s all.”

Eve pauses for a few seconds, watching as their drinks get placed down on the bar in front of them, before she says, “I believe you.”

She doesn’t believe him. But he does have a point - this isn’t the place for an argument. She doesn’t want Gemma to see any weaknesses in their marriage.

Which is why instead of arguing, Eve turns to face Niko and sends a hand up into his unruly hair, pulling his mouth down for a kiss - once again, it’s out of character in such a public place, but Eve can’t help but put on a show for Gemma, kissing Niko for longer than is necessary in the hope that Gemma will see it as a warning to stay the fuck away.

Niko seems surprised by the kiss and his body stiffens, letting Eve’s lips linger on his own without moving for just long enough that it becomes awkward, before he pulls away.

“Not here, Eve,” he says, withdrawing his hand from around Eve’s waist, as if he wasn’t the one who initiated the out of character public affection before she did. 

He quickly pays for the drinks with a single tap of his debit card against the machine, then picks up a glass in each hand, gesturing with a nod of his head that Eve should return to the table.

Eve crosses the room and takes her seat next to Gemma again, silently stewing. Perhaps it’s the two glasses of wine she has had, or all the sleep she missed out on last night, but Eve is feeling in a confrontational mood.

“So, Gemma,” says Eve, curling her fingers around the stem of her wine glass as soon as Niko places it on the table and turning her body to face Gemma again, suddenly in the mood for a conversation with her. “Tell me about you. Are you in a relationship? Got a special somebody in your life?”

“No,” Gemma answers, shaking her head slightly from side to side. “I’m newly single.”

“Oh, I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” Eve says. “Why didn’t it work out, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“We, um… well, I suppose we just realised that we weren’t right for each other.”

“Not meant to be?” Eve asks, taking a sip from her glass of wine and leaning slightly closer to Gemma as if she is listening carefully ready to give relationship advice.

“Exactly!” Gemma agrees with an enthusiastic nod. “And, you know, new job. I just moved too. It’s been a stressful time. But Niko has been a really great friend throughout it all.”

“Really? A great _friend,_ huh?” Eve is enjoying this a little too much now, and she continues, “Because Niko doesn’t talk about you. I mean,” Eve pauses for effect, then says, “he’s mentioned you. When you met and the mark appeared. He told me about that.”

“Eve,” Niko warns her, his voice gruff and stern.

The blush on Gemma’s cheeks is obvious, and Eve revels in the fact that she is making Gemma uncomfortable.

Time to push it one step further. Time to get the answer to the question that is really plaguing her.

“Did you get one too?” Eve asks, staring at Gemma with wide, unblinking eyes.

Gemma’s hand comes up to touch her collar-bone through her dress - the same place that Eve knows Niko bears Gemma’s mark - betraying the answer before Gemma manages to squeak out, “Yes.”

Eve fucking _knew_ it.

She would bet anything that Niko knew it too. So much for “honesty” in their marriage.

Eve doesn’t know what the appropriate reaction to this piece of information is - it’s not like she has experience of women telling her that her husband is their soulmate - which is why she settles for reaching out and giving Gemma a condescending pat on the thigh, before she says, “I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

With her other hand, Eve reaches out for her drink once more, only to be stopped by Niko’s hand darting out to stop her hand in its path.

“I think you’ve had enough of that. We should head home.”

“Why?” Eve boldly asks him, tilting her head to one side as she turns to stare at Niko. “I’m just having a nice girly chat with my new friend Gemma.”

“We’re leaving,” Niko reiterates, his voice almost a growl through clenched teeth. To emphasise his point, he takes one last swig from his own beer, then pushes back his chair and gets to his feet, hooking a hand under one of Eve’s armpits to drag her out of her own chair too.

“Stop that,” says Eve, forgetting that she is supposed to be proving a point to Gemma as she scowls at Niko and swats his hand away. “I don’t need you to manhandle me out of the pub.”

“Then stop embarrassing yourself,” Niko warns her under his breath.

“Are you sure you need to go?” asks Gemma, as if she hasn’t just been utterly humiliated by Eve in front of her soulmate. “There’s no need to leave on my account.”

“You’ve done nothing wrong, Gem,” Niko assures her. “Eve’s had too much to drink.

“It was lovely to meet you, _Gem,”_ says Eve, deliberately mocking Niko’s use of a pet name.

Niko can hardly steer Eve away from the table and out of the pub fast enough.

* * *

Niko manages to wait until they get home before he brings up what happened in the pub.

“What was all that about?”

Eve hangs her coat up on the hook by the front door then kicks her shoes off in the hallway, keeping herself busy to avoid having to look at Niko as she asks, “What was all what about?”

“Don’t give me that, Eve. I know you’re not stupid.”

“Then you know that I know you’ve been lying to me,” says Eve, taking the first opportunity to turn this back against Niko. 

Niko lets out a frustrated sigh.

“Go on then, Eve. Tell me what I’ve been lying about.“

“You told me that you hardly knew Gemma,“ Eve challenges him. “But she told me that you talk to her all the time. Why would you need to lie about that unless there was something more going on?”

Niko runs an exasperated hand through his hair.

“There isn’t anything more going on. Why are you trying to see the worst in me?”

“I’m not _trying_ to see the worst in you,” Eve half-yells at him, even though they are only a few feet apart. “You’re showing me your worst side! You said we had to be honest with each other, but you’re the one who is being dishonest. I’m not going to get mad at you for admitting that Gemma is attractive, but I will get annoyed if you continue to lie about it.”

Niko doesn’t seem to have an answer to that, but Eve can tell that he’s silently stewing. His thick eyebrows are furrowed together in a deep frown as he tries to come up with an appropriate response, and his lips are pressed firmly together beneath the bristles of his mustache.

“Do you need me to go first?” Eve goads him. “Do you need me to admit I’m attracted to mine before you admit you’re-”

Eve tapers off as she realises her mistake too late. 

_Shit._

Niko isn’t supposed to know that Eve knows who her soulmate is.

If Eve wasn’t so tired, if she hadn’t had those two and a half glasses of wine, then she never would have let anything slip. Eve would still have time to figure out how to tell Niko about what happened in Munich.

To figure out if he even needs to know at all.

“I thought you didn’t know who your soulmate is?” he asks quietly. There’s no anger in the tone of his voice, but Eve can still feel the quiet rage simmering beneath each word that he says. 

“I don’t,” says Eve, then she corrects herself. “I didn’t. Not until this morning. But she found me-”

Niko’s eyebrows almost disappear into his hairline.

“She?”

“Yes,” Eve says, placing an indignant hand on her hips and barely refraining from rolling her eyes at him, _“she,_ not that it matters.”

“So your soulmate is a woman?” Niko somehow seems more furious about this than the fact that Eve hadn’t told him that she knew who the soulmate was. “An attractive woman?”

“As is yours!” counters Eve, shouting at Niko as if it will somehow make her own lies of omission better.

Niko’s face turns a deeper shade of red as he snaps and bellows, “Well maybe I should invite Gemma over for a threesome if you fancy her that much!”

“Oh, I’m sure you’d love that, wouldn’t you?” scoffs Eve.

“She’s my friend, Eve. A friend who you embarrassed me in front of tonight. You were cold towards her, and you asked questions that were inappropriate and intrusive, and you made comments about her…” Niko makes a vague gesture with his hands, cupping them in front of his body, as if that is somehow more polite than saying the word itself, then finishes, “... you know.”

“Her tits?” Eve asks, raising her eyebrows in judgement because seriously, what grown man can’t even say the word ‘tits’? “You’re pissed off because I complimented her tits?”

Niko presses his lips together and shakes his head in frustration, before he says, “First Gemma, now your soulmate. So you’re into women now, is that why you’re being so distant with me?”

“Biphobia doesn’t look good on you, Niko. Anyway, it’s not like that. She’s a …” Eve trails off, because she can’t very well tell Niko that her soulmate is a dangerous woman who just earlier this week shot a man point blank in the back of the head. Deciding that the alternative, which is to say that her soulmate is a colleague, also feels wrong, Eve settles for telling him, “She’s somebody I needed to connect with professionally.”

“Oh, don’t spare my feelings with that bullshit. You wouldn’t be so secretive about the damn thing if it was professional.”

“I’m secretive about it because it’s my _job,_ Niko,” Eve says, drawing his name out in the most patronising way she can manage. “In case you had forgotten, I work for MI6. I can’t tell you everything. You’ve always known that.”

“Don’t hide this behind your fucking job!” Niko snarls. “What was the one thing I asked for when all of this started? Honesty. And have you given that to me?” Niko pauses, shaking his head from side to side with a look of pure contempt on his face. “Like _fuck_ you have. In fact, I’m starting to think that you’re sabotaging our marriage deliberately because you don’t want to be with me anymore.”

“ _I’m_ sabotaging?” Eve can barely contain a laugh at Niko’s suggestion. “ _You’re_ sabotaging. You’ve been sabotaging us ever since you met Gemma. I bet you wish I was still away on business, so that Gemma could have had you all to herself tonight.”

Niko opens his mouth to reply, then shuts it again, before he marches past Eve and starts to stomp up the stairs.

“Where are you going?” demands Eve.

“To pack a bag,” Niko yells, without turning around to look at Eve. “I’m going to stay with a friend. I don’t want to be around you right now.”

“What friend?” asks Eve, following Niko up the stairs. “You know what, I don’t care. Go. Stay with Gemma for all I care.”

“Maybe I will!”

And then he slams the door of their bedroom shut behind him.


	12. beautiful women with mysterious intentions

“Am I a bad person?”

Eve asks the question as she stares at the sticky red residue in the bottom of her empty wine glass, sitting at one end of Bill’s couch while he sits at the other end. Though Niko was the one to decide to stay with a friend following their big argument, the house feels huge without him, the weight of their argument and its consequences amplified by the emptiness. Eve managed just one night there without him before she called Bill and asked if she could crash at his. And with the convenience of having Bill available for a chinwag pretty much whenever she wants far outweighing the mild discomfort of sleeping on the unfamiliar single bed in Bill’s spare room, Eve is reluctant to return to her own house again.

“What makes anybody a bad person?” Bill answers Eve’s question with one of his own.

It’s just the kind of profound bullshit that he is only capable of producing when they’re already halfway through their second bottle of wine. With Bill’s baby asleep upstairs and his wife currently busy in her study, Eve and Bill have spent their evening marathoning episodes of  _ Don’t Tell The Bride _ while drinking far more than is appropriate on a weeknight.

Eve sits up, untucking her feet from beneath her body so that she can reach for the bottle, topping up her glass before offering the rest of the wine out to Bill so that he can do the same.

“What about telling your husband to go and stay with his soulmate because you don’t care about him?” she asks, chewing her lower lip between her teeth.

“Everybody has good and bad in them,” Bill attempts to reason. “And you’ve had to deal with a lot lately. Personally and professionally.”

It’s an awfully polite way of summarising the last few weeks in Eve’s car crash of a life. 

Eve would like to think that she’s a good person, but she worries increasingly that it’s not the case. Life is not being kind to her right now - perhaps some kind of karmic intervention for not being as good of a person as she originally thought? Why else would she end up bearing the mark of a professional killer?

“Do you think she has any good in her?” Eve asks Bill.

Eve doesn’t need to expand on who “she” is for Bill to understand.

“She didn’t kill either of us even though she had the chance,” he answers, swirling the wine around in his glass before he takes a sip.

“Oh, so she’s a good person just because she  _ only _ spiked your drink instead of killing you?” Eve says, as she lets out a snort. “How kind of her.”

“You’re the one who met her, Eve,” Bill points out, before he flips the question back to Eve. “Do  _ you  _ think she has any good in her?”

Eve stops to think before she answers. The charming smile, the fancy clothes, the captivating look in her eyes. You wouldn’t know that she’s a dangerous killer if you passed her in the street. It’s hard to believe that she’s all bad.

The mark on Eve’s stomach probably has something to do with her quiet hope that the assassin is more than just a killer.

“I think she’s misunderstood,” Eve says, her words slow and thoughtful, thinking back to their brief encounter in Eve’s hotel room in Munich. “I think she’s dangerous and a psychopath but I don’t think that inherently makes her a bad person. I think she probably feels very lonely and just wants to be seen. She just wants to be understood.”

“And you’re going to be the one to understand her?” 

Eve can practically feel the skepticism radiating off Bill.

“If not me, then who else?”

“I just worry that all this happening at the same time is going to end in catastrophe.” says Bill. Eve opens her mouth to protest, but he quickly presses on, cutting Eve off before she can start to speak. “And I mean this with absolutely no judgement because lord knows I’ve done some stupid things in my time because of a mark. But your marriage has hit a bump and she’s come along at the same time and it worries me that you might be using her to bandage the wound.”

Eve hates how much truth there is in what Bill says, because there  _ is _ a part of her that is hoping for something to happen, hoping for the assassin to make contact again or even for another body to turn up, just to give her something to do. Eve doesn’t like to be bored, especially right now, when a distraction from her derailed marriage would be most welcome.

“I sent the perfume to the lab to get tested,” Eve muses aloud, the wine in her system encouraging her to blurt out the first thing that comes to mind to prolong the conversation about the assassin. It helps to talk about it, helps Eve to feel a little less like she’s drowning in the insanity of it all. “I don’t know what I’m expecting them to find, but I hope they can give us something new to work with.”

“The perfume she left for you?”

“In my suitcase,” Eve confirms with a nod.

“And the German forensics didn’t pick it up when they checked the room?” Bill asks.

“A bottle of perfume in a woman’s suitcase?” Eve arches an eyebrow at Bill, then says, “Why would that be suspicious?”

Bill nods his head slightly in concession, before he looks back at Eve with sharp eyes and asks, “But you noticed it?”

“Because it’s not mine. She must have left it for me.”

“So your girlfriend is giving you presents now. Big deal.”

“Yes, but  _ why _ did she leave it for me?” Eve asks, deliberately ignoring Bill’s ‘girlfriend’ remark, because she knows that reacting to it will cause more trouble than it’s worth.

Bill sips at his wine and hums thoughtfully against the rim of the glass, before he replies, “Well, there are a number of reasons.”

“Such as?”

“Such as she wants to kill you and the perfume is supposed to be the means of doing that,” Bill suggests.

“That’s not it,” Eve says, shaking her head resolutely. “Not her style. It’s too impersonal. I don’t think she wants me dead and if she did, she wouldn’t do it like that. I’m her soulmate, so killing me would have to be her magnum opus.”

“Okay, option number two,” continues Bill, a little smirk pushing at the corners of his mouth, “she thinks you smell and is trying to drop a hint.”

“Sensible suggestions only, please,” Eve says, rolling her eyes.

“How about this? She dropped it in your suitcase by accident.”

“You mean like she accidentally carved her initial into that guy’s stomach? This is a game to her, Bill. Nothing that she does is accidental.”

Bill stares into the bottom of his wine glass, as if expecting the answers to magically appear from its contents.

“Okay,” he eventually says, “so if we’re being sensible, I think there’s only a couple of options.”

Eve leans forward in her seat, wondering if, maybe for the first time ever, drinking wine has provided the clarity needed for a truly inspirational idea.

“Go on,” she prompts him.

“One, it really is just a present,” Bill says. “She wanted to leave you something you can remember her by, something that smells of her, something that with just one spritz will have you thinking of her.”

“Or…?” Eve asks, hoping that there is a better suggestion than the assassin leaving her the perfume as a romantic gift.

“Or, I’ve drunk far too much wine to be able to figure it out,” concludes Bill. He looks at Eve with raised eyebrows and grimaces apologetically. “Sorry.”

“I think I like that option best,” Eve says. She lifts her wine, or what remains of it in the glass, aloft between herself and Bill, then says, “To drinking away our problems.”

Bill raises his own glass, tapping it against Eve’s with a gentle clink.

“To beautiful women with mysterious intentions,” he replies, a glimmer of mischief in his eyes.

* * *

“What are your intentions with Eve Polastri?”

Konstantin has been telling Villanelle off for … well, Villanelle doesn’t know  _ exactly _ how long he’s been doing it, because she switched off after about thirty seconds, but it feels like forever. It’s only when he mentions Eve’s name that she startles out of her own thoughts and returns to reality, where Konstantin has stopped pacing up and down her apartment while he scolds her and is staring down at her instead, an angry scowl on his face.

“I don’t know,” Villanelle answers with a shrug, slumping back against the cushions of her couch so that she is almost lying lengthways across it, such is her disinterest in what opinions Konstantin might have about Eve.

“You play with her. You follow her. You poison her friend.”

“I did not poison him,” Villanelle is quick to correct. “I was actually very kind to let him live, don’t you think?”

“Eve Polastri knows your face,” Konstantin continues, ignoring Villanelle’s interjection. “How long before she knows everything else about you too?”

Villanelle  _ wants _ Eve to know everything, just as she wants to know everything about Eve, but somehow she doesn’t think that Konstantin will be happy with that answer.

“I am messing with her,” Villanelle explains. “Fucking with her. Giving her just enough that she thinks she’s doing her job. I have all the power. She has nothing except what I give to her.”

Konstantin shakes his head and continues pacing back and forth.

“That’s not what it looks like from here.”

“I think, Konstantin,” Villanelle spits his name out with as much of a patronising tone as she can muster, “that you’re only seeing what you want to see.”

“What I’m seeing,” Konstantin counters, “is you messing up your life, your  _ career, _ for a woman you’ve only met … how many times is it now? Twice? I know you are not stupid, Villanelle, so why do you act like you are?”

Villanelle presses her lips together as she frowns, trying to come up with a better response than the  _ “ _ you’re stupid _ ”  _ that initially jumps to her tongue.

“What happened with your soulmate?” Villanelle eventually asks, when she remembers that Konstantin hates Villanelle prying into his personal life even more than he hates it when she goes rogue on a job. “Did she turn you down? Was she already with somebody else? Did she break your heart?”

Konstantin’s thick eyebrows furrow into a heavy frown, and Villanelle thinks her guesses must have hit rather close to the mark.

“Don’t forget what happened with Anna,” he reminds her.

“We’re not talking about Anna,” Villanelle is quick to dismiss. “We’re talking about you and how you’re jealous of what I have with Eve because your soulmate didn’t want you.”

Konstantin buries his hands deep into the pocket of his coat (seriously, what is this man’s obsession with wearing a coat indoors, particularly one so shapeless and frumpy?) and shakes his head at Villanelle.

“It’s not going to work the way you think it will,” he says to her. “People like you don’t get happily ever after.”

“People like me?” Villanelle repeats back to him. “Monsters, you mean?”

Konstantin takes a step closer to Villanelle and when he speaks, it is in a voice that is much softer than before, as if he is trying to make her forget that he has just told her she isn’t worthy of being happy or loved.

“You are not a monster,” he tells her. “You are brilliant. You are so good at what you do.”

Villanelle is too smart to fall for his tricks.

“Maybe I don’t want to do it anymore,” she says, with a nonchalant shrug. “Maybe I’m done.”

“Then what happens next? Retirement isn’t an option. You’re either alive or you’re dead.”

Villanelle rolls her eyes and replies in a dry voice, “That is generally how life works, correct.”

“But you like being alive. You like money and clothes. You like good food. You like your job.”

“I like Eve,” Villanelle interjects stubbornly. 

She  _ does _ like Eve, likes her so much. The curls in her hair and her name, her initials that stand out black against Villanelle’s pale stomach, her voice and her passion and her eyes and  _ everything. _ Villanelle likes it all, and she would like so much more if Eve would only give her the chance to see it. The husk of her voice first thing in the morning. The way that she eats when she is ravenous. The shape of her butt. Villanelle would like all that stuff too because it’s  _ Eve, _ her soulmate.

“Does she like you?” asks Konstantin.

“The million dollar question,” Villanelle replies quickly, brushing the question off as if it is nothing, even though the thought of Eve not liking her leaves her with an ache in her gut.

“And if she hurts you?” Konstantin asks. “Like Anna did?”

There’s a painful twinge in Villanelle’s chest and it’s  _ not _ heartbreak, it’s really not, because Anna is just a distant memory now. Villanelle is over what happened, has been over what happened for years.

“Then I’ll deal with it,” Villanelle says, expressionless as she stares Konstantin down.

He returns her stare with mild disapproval in his steely eyes, before he sends a hand inside his thick coat and pulls something out from within an inside pocket.

“You need to choose what is important to you,” says Konstantin, taking a couple of steps closer until he is close enough to pass the item across to Villanelle, which she quickly realises is a postcard. 

Villanelle flips the postcard over in her hands and stares down at the glossy image of the recognisable London Eye, and her blood starts to chill.

She stands up and walks over to the laptop on the nearby table, taking a seat beside the wide arched window that fills the room with light and offers a beautiful view of the Parisian rooftops. The laptop screen blinks into life when she taps a couple of the keys, and Villanelle swiftly locates an unassuming notepad app, into which she copies that code printed in small letters on the back of the postcard.

As Villanelle presses enter, the screen flashes black for a split second, before her next target pops up.

_ Eve Polastri. _

She doesn’t let herself react, because that’s probably exactly what Konstantin wants her to do. But she isn’t surprised that it’s Eve. Villanelle didn’t need to check the laptop to know that it would be Eve that they want her to kill. She knew as soon as Konstantin gave her the postcard from London, perhaps knew even before that when he told her to choose what was important to her.

There are two photographs of Eve on the left hand side of the screen. The first is a headshot, perhaps a passport photo or one taken for a work ID badge, while the second is a picture clearly taken without Eve noticing the photographer, a candid shot of her getting off a red London bus wearing a dark blue raincoat that hangs large on her small frame and holding an oversized bag in front of her body as she steps out onto the pavement. 

Villanelle grinds her teeth together. She doesn’t like the idea of somebody following Eve to keep tabs on her, but she dislikes the idea of killing Eve even more.

As she reads through the information on the screen, Villanelle is struck by how little she actually knows about Eve. Villanelle knows what Eve smells like, she knows the little crease between her eyebrows and the husk of her voice. The important stuff. But the briefing on the screen contains more actual information about Eve than Villanelle herself already knows.

She skims over Eve’s marital status, because Villanelle  _ does _ know that and seeing it written here in black and white fills her with just as much jealousy as when she first found out about Eve’s inconvenient husband, and lets her eyes settle on Eve’s date of birth. Now that  _ is _ something worth memorising. Villanelle mouths the date a few times, silently committing it to memory, and vows to buy her a gift when the time comes.

If Eve is still alive by then.

How is Villanelle supposed to decide what to do?

There must be a way for her to choose both, a way for her to keep Eve alive  _ and _ keep her job.

But if not, which one should she choose?

The woman she feels such a strong connection with but hardly knows, or the job that wants her to dispose of her soulmate like every other random nobody that she’s ever killed?

Villanelle is so caught up in the dilemma that she doesn’t realise that Konstantin has walked up behind her until he places a hand on her shoulder.

“It’s time for you to decide who you are loyal to, Villanelle.”

* * *

“Five days! 

Eve stares down at the screen of her phone, still in slight disbelief that after ignoring every single one of Eve’s texts over the last few days, which have ranged from desperate apologies to pleas for him to come home so they can talk, Niko’s first text back to her says this.

She looks up, hoping that the other three in her office will share her outrage.

“It’s been five days since he decided we need some space and the first text he sends me is reminding me to put the trash out,” Eve tells them. “No acknowledgement of the messages I’ve sent him, nor the fact that he pretty much walked out on his own marriage. Just this condescending bullshit, as if he thinks I’m incapable of functioning as an adult without him.”

“Prick,” Elena mutters under her breath. 

Eve’s phone buzzes in her hand with another new message, before she has even had time to recover from the first.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Eve snaps, as she reads the second message. “ _ ‘Don’t forget the recycling too.’  _ What an asshole!”

“At least you’ve got the hot assassin as a backup,” Elena comments unhelpfully.

“What did I do to deserve this?” Eve groans, slumping back in her chair. “Stuck between an asshole husband and … and  _ her. _ Who did I piss off to get this bad karma? You know what, if Niko wants the trash taking out he can do it himself. I’m staying at Bill’s at the moment anyway.”

There’s a pause, before Bill says, “So, about that…”

“Bill,” Eve whines.

“I’m sorry, okay! Keiko’s sister is in town this weekend so we need the spare room.”

“I can take the couch, I really don’t mind,” Eve pleads with him. “You won’t even notice that I’m there.”

Bill grimaces apologetically, then says, “Sorry, Eve.”

Eve frowns and presses her lips together, not exactly thrilled at the thought of returning home and being confronted by Niko’s absence. Or worse, by Niko himself.

“It’s fine,” she tells Bill, even though it’s not really fine at all. “I’ll manage. I’ll pick my stuff up from yours after work and go home.”

“I’ve got some good news for you, Eve,” says Kenny, rolling his office chair backwards so that he can see Eve past the screen on her desk that otherwise blocks the view.

“Please, Kenny,” Eve begs, deciding that she can justify being a little bit dramatic, given the circumstances. “Please brighten my miserable day.”

“Oh,” Kenny says, his face falling a little. “Well, it’s not that exciting. But I’ve had the lab results back on the perfume. I’ve emailed them across.”

Eve perks up in her seat and reaches for her computer mouse, clicking a couple of times to open up her inbox. She quickly skims over the body of the email, which reads with the kind of politeness you’d expect from a fairly new employee still trying to impress his superiors, before she opens the attachments to see if the lab has found anything worthwhile.

_ Please, _ Eve silently prays to herself,  _ please just give me something I can work with.  _

Eve’s wishes are half-fuelled by genuine professionalism, the longing for a tangible lead that will propel their investigation forwards, and half-fuelled by her own personal curiosity about the motives of the woman who left the perfume for Eve to find.

She reads the document from the lab with a frown on her face. Parts of it are pretty scientific, going way over Eve’s head, and Eve scrolls through the chemical analysis until she reaches the conclusion later on in the report.

“What have they found?” asks Bill, with a look in his eyes that shows he is just as hungry for information as Eve is.

“The perfume is just a perfume,” she says, almost disappointed. Eve doesn’t know what she was expecting, but she was hoping for  _ something. _

“Told you,” Bill says, slapping the palm of his hand against the surface of his desk in triumph. “She’s a hopeless romantic.”

“They did manage to identify it though. It’s called La Vil-”

Eve stops mid-word as she reads from the report. The skin of her stomach starts to tingle - no, it  _ burns,  _ but not in a painful way, instead in a way that makes Eve feel like she’s woken up from a decades-long coma. She presses her hand against her stomach and traces the mark through the fabric of her cotton blouse, fingertip starting at one end and moving down to the point at the bottom, before sliding back up the other line. Eve doesn’t need to see the mark to know exactly where it lies against her skin, just like she doesn’t need any further confirmation to know exactly what the ‘V’ stands for.

“Villanelle,” says Eve, as she looks up at the others, the corners of her mouth just starting to turn up into a little smile. “Our assassin’s name is Villanelle.”

* * *

The high of discovering the assassin’s name has worn off somewhat by the time Eve makes her way home.

Eve’s mood goes south again when she gets off the bus at the end of her street, laden with bags of her things collected from Bill’s house, and notices that most of her neighbours have already put their bins out at the side of the road, ready to be collected by the trucks first thing in the morning. In the excitement of getting the lab results back, Eve had almost forgotten about the ongoing rift between herself and Niko, and she realises that there is no way for her to win this. Either she does as she’s been told and takes the trash out, which means that Niko still has control over her despite the fact that he isn’t even here, or she doesn’t do it out of spite, which is likely to cause yet more tension if Niko does ever decide to stop sulking like a toddler and return home.

It’s a no-win situation.

Eve lets herself into the house and drops her bags at the bottom of the stairs before closing the front door behind her and hanging her coat up on the hook on the wall.

She can deal with the bins later.

As Eve kicks off her shoes haphazardly in the hall, grateful that Niko isn’t around to scold her for leaving a mess in her wake, she reaches for the light but freezes with her hand halfway to the switch.

There’s somebody else in the house.

Eve can  _ feel _ it.

What if somebody has broken in? Or worse, what if Niko has returned to start another argument?

Picking up the nearest thing she could possibly use to defend herself, which turns out to be a large umbrella belonging to Niko that is propped up against the wall near the bottom of the stairs, Eve clutches it tight in both hands and creeps down the hallway.

“Hello?” she calls out into the dark house. “I’m armed!”

As she moves further into the house, reaching the doorway into the living room, Eve considers how best to use the umbrella on an intruder, should it come down to that. A swipe through the air as if she’s wielding a baseball bat, or a sharp jab of the point into the intruder’s gut?

Eve rounds the corner and steps into the dark living room.

Mustering all the bravery she can, Eve says loudly, “I’m calling the police!” 

A lamp flicks on at the other end of the room, revealing a familiar sight sitting in an armchair. The assassin is sprawled in the chair as if this is her home, not Eve’s, lounging back against the cushions in a sleek snow-coloured suit with a plunging neckline caused by lapels that dip low enough to reveal an awful lot of skin. Eve swallows, eyes going wide as she takes in the clearly visible collarbones and the litany of freckles that decorate the assassin’s creamy skin, before she notices the small gun in her hands, black metal against the white of her suit.

“Why would you call the police?” asks the assassin, as if she  _ isn’t  _ holding a deadly weapon, sweeping her free hand through honey coloured locks that tumble over her shoulders. Her lips press into an amused smirk, and then she says, “Hello again, Eve.”

“Hello,” Eve lowers the umbrella, then tries to swallow down her anxiety, before she adds, “Villanelle.”

**Author's Note:**

> For sneak peeks, friendship, or general squealing about Killing Eve, you can find me on both tumblr and twitter @almostafantasia.


End file.
